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The subject of one of Google's many announcements at Wednesday's Google Press Day was Google Notebook, a somewhat mysterious project that Google has described only as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others." Google will be launching Google Notebook sometime next week, but today you can see a whole pile of screenshots of the product in this Flickr set. Even from 18 screenshots, though, it's tough to tell exactly how Google Notebook works, but to my eyes it looks basically like an online bookmark system. "Notebooks" seem to be little more than collections of links that you can manage through a web-based interface. In the screenshots the user searches for "gifts for mom" on Google, and then uses a small pop-up in the corner of the results page to save and annotate one of the resulting links. Then the user goes to the Google Notebook site (google.com/gn, but don't bother, it doesn't work) where all of her notebooks are displayed. This looks very Ajaxy, including some pretty transparent drag-and-drop stuff. Notes can be edited and there seem to be rich-text controls, and of course there are buttons to share or make notebooks private, as well as "New Notebook" and "Add note" buttons. And that, it would seem, is about it. In There doesn't appear to be any tagging functionality or any social aspect a la del.icio.us. In the screenshots the pop-up box only seems to be displayed on Google results pages and I don't see any other indication that this is, say, a Firefox extension. However, this shot shows a URL box, so obviously possible to add URLs that aren't included in search results, just more difficult. A bookmarklet will undoubtedly be created either by Google or some third party to make that easier, but I think very soon we'll see that functionality integrated into Google Toolbar.

Obviously Google Notebook isn't intended to compete with social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us, but while the interface and the snappiness that comes with Google's web apps appeal to me, I don't really see anything Google Notebook can do that I can't already do with del.icio.us (with the possible exception of the ability to rearrange items), and without tagging I can imagine notebooks with many items quickly becoming unmanageable. However, for all I know these screenshots are of an older version of Google Notebook, and what we'll be seeing next week might be something different entirely.