For example, encoding HTTP://SQUAREGALAXY.COM results in this image:

But encoding http://squaregalaxy.com (lowercase) results in this more complicated (harder to scan) image:

Google Keep really wasn’t impressive. Evernote and Springpad both did much better.

The fundamental difference between Evernote and Springpad comes down to the format of notes. Evernote treats all notes like small documents, while Springpad allows for various different types of notes.

Evernote‘s small documents are quite flexible. You can insert photos, audio, links, lists, and text formatting. Evernote makes it easy to turn things into documents with speech recognition from audio files and OCR (reading text) from image files. Evernote works like of like a person keeping a notebook (or many notebooks), occasionally taping pictures or business cards into the pages.

Springpad also allows document-type notes, but also supports notes about movies, music, books, places, recipes, products, TV shows, alarms, events, contacts, tasks, and check lists. Springpad works more like a bulletin board, with recipes cards, sticky notes, business cards, photos, and fliers all attached.

Since different people take notes differently, both Evernote and Springpad’s approaches are valid. When it comes time to look for something, such as someone’s contact information, the notebook user starts flipping through all their pages trying to find the information, while the bulletin board user starts looking at all the business cards for the right one.

But while supporting many different content types may seem like an advantage Springpad has over Evernote, Evernote’s simplicity is also its advantage. Since Evernote supports just small documents, it makes it really easy for third party developers to write tools and apps that interface with Evernote. Evernote has a very large ecosystem of mobile apps, desktop apps, and web apps. Springpad has considerably smaller ecosystem.

And now if you remember my criteria for judging note-taking systems, I will now give grades.

Platforms

• Evernote: A because of the wide ecosystem of apps on just about every platform.
• Springpad: C+ for covering the mobile/web platforms.
• Google Keep: D because their Android app didn’t even run on my older Android phone.

Data Export

• Evernote: A because it easily allowed exporting to HTML files.
• Springpad: A- for also allowing exporting.
• Google Keep: F because I couldn’t find any place to export my notes.

Bookmarks

• Evernote: B because while it provided many good ways to capture webpages into notes, it lost the sense that it was saving a bookmark instead of a document.
• Springpad: B because while it kept the bookmark well, sometimes I want a longer summary than the one it saved.
• Google Keep: F.

Media Types

• Evernote: C+ for saving pictures and audio, but only as documents.
• Springpad: A for strong support of many media types.
• Google Keep: D+ for supporting a few types, but only from its Android app.

Cost

• Evernote: C for providing a basic free service.
• Springpad: B+ for being completely free, but with some offers snuck in.
• Google Keep: A

Organization

• Evernote: B for categories, tags, geotagging, and searching.
• Springpad: B for categories, some geotagging, searching, and content types.
• Google Keep: C for color coding and searching.

User Experience

• Evernote: B- for providing a lot of power, but lacking a little refinement.
• Springpad: A- for a really clean and powerful interface.
• Google Keep: C- for a clean interface, but lacking power.

Support

• Evernote: A because it has a strong business model around note taking.
• Springpad: B- for a reasonable business model, but may be lacking some adoption.
• Google Keep: C- because Google likes to spring clean up things like this.

APIs

• Evernote: A because it has a well used API.
• Springpad: B- for a good API that needs better usage.
• Google Keep: F for not providing a public API.

Alternatives: Since note-taking is not a really strict activity, there are many alternatives. One reasonable alternative is using a blog or wiki for note-taking. What you get with systems like Evernote or Springpad are powerful applications on various platforms, picture and audio recognition, auto categorization and content analysis.

Alexis De Tocqueville 1805-1859

• Platforms: must be able to use from a web browser and from Android.
• Data export: can I get my notes back out of the system
• Bookmarks: A lot of what I like to save for reading later are articles that I find online
• Media types: What kinds of things can I keep?
• Cost: Must be free
• Organization: I need to be able to quickly find things, either through organization or searching
• User Experience: How easy is it to use it?  Does it perform well?
• Support: How likely am I to be still using it in 10 years?
• APIs: Other than using their apps, are there other ways to put things into it?

There may be other things as well. Since I’ve never looked at any before, I’m not sure what I should be looking at.

Among the systems I’ll be reviewing: Google Keep, Evernote, Springpad, I’ll be looking at alternatives like keeping text documents in Dropbox.

As I make discoveries, I’ll note them in the comments.

Oops.  False alarm.  Only at 965.  The other 35 comments are spam, so they don’t count.

Google Offers tries to play in an over-saturated market of daily deal sites.  Google may decide to stop offering Offers directly, and role that functionality into Google Shopping.

Google Checkout plays better in some use cases than in others.  Google may decide to refine the scope of Wallet/Checkout, perhaps restricting its use as a third party checkout system, where Paypal maintains a stronghold.

Google Finance hasn’t seen a significant update in many years.  Being a non-essential componenet to the Google portfolio, Finance may find itself in the same situation of Reader with decreased usage and lack of profitability.

Google Toolbar for IE will likely see decreased usage because of IE 10 and Windows 8.  Most Google fans will probably just use Google Chrome instead, leaving little motivation for Google to continue supporting Toolbar.

Google Picasa is an oddity.  It doesn’t appear to fit well into any of Google’s main strategies.  It is also one of Google’s few remaining desktop installed software offering.  I don’t think Google will kill Picasa, but they may decide to sell it off to someone else.

Google Talk for Windows may go away as Google pushes people to use chat in Gmail, Google+, or mobile apps. Talk may service spring cleanings depending on how it plays into the Google Apps for Businesses strategy.

Google Voice allows you to have a single phone number that connects to all your phones.  But with many people ditching land lines in favor of their (Android) phone, Google Voice is looking more and more obsolete.

Orkut probably still has quite the following in various geographies, but it seems odd that Google would want to continue two competing social platforms.

Google Alerts is a minor feature that isn’t very well used, so I could see it going away in favor of other Google efforts.

Google News is a lot like Google Reader, in that it aggregates articles from all sorts of other sites, and doesn’t contain any advertising.  With more people being alerted to news from their social media sites, and with news providers requiring paid subscriptions for online access, discontinuing Google News would be about as bold as discontinuing Google reader.

Obama’s solution: Get more credit cards, and don’t negotiate with the Republicans about alternatives.

Republican’s solution: Go ahead and get more credit cards, but only if you reduce how much the government is spending.