I love Evernote.  This program is probably one of the most exciting things I have found on the Internet in a very long time.  What is it you ask, well it is an online reservoir for all your thoughts, and it collects those thoughts extremely well.  Basically, if you can take a picture of it, type it, draw it, or email it, Evernote can store it.

I know there are a lot of storage options out there on the net, but Evernote is a lot more.  Since the Internet’s inception there has been a chasm between the electronic bits created on computers and the ideas, drawings, sketches, notes, and everything else that ends up on paper.  If you wanted those paper things to get stored on your computer, you had to recreate a lot of the work you had already done.  It is no fun to go back and type in the text of a brainstorming session.  Now, with Evernote you can easily upload the fruits of your brainstorm and keep them online for easy searchability and everywhere all the time accessibility.  As long as you can scan it or take a picture of it with your camera phone, you can store it on Evernote.

Once that picture is there, Evernote will attempt to do Optical Character Recognition or OCR on the picture.  As long as the writing is clear and the picture is good enough, Evernote does a pretty good job of finding the words and making them searchable.  Think about that.  You do a brainstorming session and you take a picture of the notes and upload them to Evernote.  After the Evernote servers have some time to do the crunching, you suddenly have the ability to do searches where Evernote shows you pictures that contain the word you are searching for…That is a game-changer.

If that weren’t good enough, Evernote also gives you the ability to run a client application on your computer that syncs with the Evernote website that gives you even more capability to manipulate and use your notes.  You can look at your notes and make changes, and those changes will be reflected on the Evernote website.

In addition to the desktop client, there is a microscopic client that can be downloaded to your smart phone which gives you the ability to create, upload, and search your Evernote notes right from your phone.  Having access to all your notes and ideas wherever you are can be very empowering.

I have only been using Evernote for a week so there are a lot of things the site can do that I haven’t discovered yet but even so I am falling in love with the functionality.

There is one improvement that Evernote needs to add in order to make their product an epic win and that is the ability to collaborate on notes. The notes are so versatile in how you can use them that they would make fantastic collaboration tools and yet I can’t find any way to share notes so that others can add information to the notes.

Other than that, Evernote is pretty close to perfect.