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Picnik - Still better

Picnik, which I so elegantly discussed when it launched, today announced that they had opened up all the functions previously only available for paying members of the service. Here’s the TechCrunch post on it.

Well, I think that’s a fantastic move. With other webbased photo editing services cropping up like mushrooms in a humid forest on a spring day, this helps to really draw people to your service (and keep them there). I guess there was a reason why Flickr decided to partner with Picnik for direct editing of Flickr photos, and why Picnik is the default application to edit photos stored on Box.net.

Will Evernote read my handwriting?

That’s what I was wondering when I received an invite to the preview version of the Evernote Webservice today. And as a matter of fact, it does:

Evernote

Evernote, previously known only as a very popular notetaking application, has ventured forth and is planning on conquering the web as well. Complementing that new webversion, Evernote offers a beta desktop version, which lets you synchronize your content. And here’s another plus: The Windows version of the app (a Mac version is soon to come) can be installed and run via WINE on Linux. Apart from a single button you better not click, the app is working flawlessly on my computer. In case you don’t trust my word, here’s a little screenshot:

Evernote on Linux

So what is it Evernote can do for you? For one, it can do what I so elegantly displayed above: recognize writing in an image, even handwriting, and even when it’s written by me and photographed using a crappy cameraphone. Meaning you can just take an image of a handwritten page, put it either into the desktop app or send it to the webversion (either way, since they’re synchronized anyway) and the search function will find whatever’s written on that piece of paper.

In addition, Evernote offers a webclipping bookmarklet, letting you clip images and text right into your Evernote notebook.

And since we’re all social, you can publish your notebooks too, like so:

http://preview.evernote.com/pub/stormgrass/Public/

Go on, click it.

Well, what can I say. I’m impressed. Even though there are other notetaking services online (most prominent ones being Google Notebook or Zoho Notebook), none of them offer a service as sophisticated as Evernote.

Secondbrain.com - For when one just isn’t enough

In my everlasting quest to find the ultimate lifestreaming service to combine the data from all the shit I use online, I today stumbled upon SecondBrain.com (”stumble upon” meaning “read on TechCrunch“, really).

Unlike other services like FriendFeed, Tumblr, Profilactic, and a myriad of others, SecondBrain actually doesn’t just want your lifestream, it wants your stuff. Yes, that’s right. Plugging into the APIs of the services you want them to track, they’ll import everything into your SecondBrain account.

Now there are good and bad sides to that. The good one? It’s really a library of sorts, aggregating and making searchable the content you have created online. This is clearly a lot better than what most other lifestreaming services do, especially since SecondBrain imports all of the metadata associated with your content too. Thus, you get a real tagcloud of the stuff you do online.

Now, here’s what’s bad: Needing the service to access an API makes it a lot less flexible. Right now they’re supporting 11 services, which is good for a start, but simply not enough when you want to give people the ability to aggregate all their user generated content. Adding RSS feeds is not possible, so you are stuck with the services SecondBrain offers.

SecondBrain also lets you import your documents from Zoho and GoogleDocs, switching the status of the documents to private automatically. This is what I expected, but I also expected them to not show people that I’m actually synching my GoogleDocs (which SecondBrain does, as it displays publicly what services the lifestream’s owner is using).

Apart from that library focus, SecondBrain gives users the option to add content to SecondBrain directly or to comment on another user’s items. Of course you can decide to follow other users’ lifestreams as well.

Overall SecondBrain is a good service, even though the lacking support for RSS feeds is making it a lot less flexible than many of its competitors.




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