Note-taking and Optical Character Recognition service Evernote may not have a whole lot of users yet, but the users it does have absolutely love it. There’s a whole lot more to love, and more reasons to use Evernote, with a slew of announcements the company made today.
Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.
To be honest, I don’t personally care for Evernote’s core product, I’ve found its Optical Character Recognition to be weak. The company has told me that I should put data in, use it as a blunt instrument for remembering things and someday their continually improving algorithm will be able to read text in notes and images better than it can now. I don’t really buy that. That said, thousands of other people are absolutely gaga over the service and no one can deny that their announcements today are very cool.
Evernote already works on the desktop, on the iPhone and on the web. Now we’ll see all kinds of other applications support Evernote as well. The company points to a Salesforce integration in the works and jokes that even a Rock Band tie-in could happen. The API uses standards based authentication protocol OAuth, which is fabulous. That means that if you as a developer want to tie in to Evernote, or today’s newly launched Netflix API or any of the Google Data APIs, then you’ve got one standard form of API to plug in to. That’s a big time saver.
Even more exciting is full XML data export. Nervous about dedicating a whole lot of time to import business cards, notes and other information into Evernote? Now you don’t have to be, because the company allows easy export of all that data in a standard format you can take elsewhere. This kind of data portability allows users to feel comfortable investing time and data in a service. It’s something that too many other similar services don’t allow.
For coverage of the Evernote news by someone who likes Evernote far more, check out Rafe Needleman’s post at Webware. If the entire service can perform as well as the company has in making the moves it announced today, then Evernote should be well worth your time.
