Pocket vs Google Inbox/Keep/Save
Pocket vs Google Inbox/Keep/Save
Firstly just a heads up this is by no means an objective head-to-head. It is simply me verbalising the advantages/disadvantages each of the services has in my day-to-day life whilst flexing those writing muscles weakened by years of procrastination. But then, any service which helps your personal workflow arguably cannot be objectively reviewed anyway. If you love Google (or indeed, Mozilla), this will have an impact on encouraging you to use the service. And anything that spurs you into action on your hordes of tasks and reading will always be a positive.
As for the reason I’m reviewing my usage now, it is because I became intruiged by the “Save to Inbox” extension whilst I was looking for something else. Just its existence broadened the concept of your “Inbox” to something more like an office inbox, or something more akin to the GTD way of thinking… Where it isn’t just your e-mails, but your tasks, reading, everything.
It’s not the first time Google’s e-mail service has been used for this. There was a time extensions started to spring up to turn Gmail into an all-in-one, GTD task manager. They certainly worked, although there was something clunky about them as they were re-fashioning the e-mail paradigm into something larger.
In the case of Inbox, what Google has done instead is the opposite, re-fashioning the e-mail experience into something more like a task manager. E-mails themselves become one cog of the Inbox experience, which can include read later functionality, reminders, and tasks.
Why I use Pocket
When I came across Pocket’s first incarnation, “Read It Later”, it was with a curious interest. I wasn’t a fan of bookmarks anyway. I never saw the point in bookmarks syncronising services, but I was instead much more of the Gmail mindset that I should just keep my entire history in case there’s something I later realise might be useful. Web addresses are rarely so large that you can forget them, and you’re either a fan of the site and stay on it for quite a while or you are on there for a minute thanks to a Google search. I rarely found bookmarking useful compared to searching my history, or even doing a search via Google again to find I’d visited that page before.
As for “reading it later”, I could see potential in the concept. There are regularly pages I wanted to read later, or try to remember later on. The “keep everything”, searchable history ideal fails when you haven’t actually visited the site in question. However, I ultimately decided that fitting that paradigm into my everyday browsing was largely pointless when my University browsing consisted largely of lolcats and Youtube Poops (it was 2008…)
Thanks to a Politician
It was actually whilst involved more closely with the green movement for a while, when I visited a local question time event between parliamentary candidates, that my eyes opened up to some kind of better way to organise my information. A friend whispered in my ear to keep an eye on the Labour politician (the incombent). Every time she was asked a question, she would quickly flick through her folder for the right coloured tab. By the time the question was finished, she was ready to casually roll the answer naturally off the tip of her tongue; the facts a glance away if she needed them.
At first, this came across as rather fake. Typical politician; ready to open her folder of approved/(“alternative”) facts to back her up in every situation. She didn’t need an opinion, she could just spew the party line in her PR-like way.
But a few weeks later, I started to see the benefits of such a system. Coming into my last year of uni and having that quickly searchable database of answers both for and against an argument would be beneficial. But even on a personal level, having an archive of articles that have shaped my opinion was also useful. It was around the same time they renamed Read-It-Later to Pocket, which was an apt metaphor for me as I regularly had my pockets stuffed full of things I wanted to keep and/or read later.
I started to fit Pocket into my news reading, spending some time each day filling it up with stories, then either marking them straight away to archive or reading them later.
I quickly found it was the archive which I used most, and got myself a subscription a month later. Pocket became my personal information organiser, along with keeping a backup of articles in case they went offline. Although I actually delved into that archive less often than I thought, the times I did use it more than made up for the cost of the service. My only problem is my “to-read” list grew, and continues to grow, faster than I can actually read them. Well, it’s not really a problem, it just annoys that obsessive side of me.
Chucking the Pocket for an Inbox
Meet Google’s Inbox. A service I was a very early adopter of (mostly for the pretty interface, truth be told). In all honesty the service wasn’t really evolutionary, as I had been using Google’s sorting algorithm for a while in Gmail anyway. In that respect Inbox was just a different way of presenting your Gmail, in a way that could be universal across platforms. The reminders were an interesting addition, as I was an avid user of Google Tasks at the time. But ultimately I rarely used them thanks to a lack of integration between those two services; tasks wouldn’t appear in Inbox, and vice versa.
Seeing the addition of “saving to Inbox” interested me. Was it evidence of deeper integration with tasks? Or was it more of a shake up, and the very reason they kept tasks seperate? It appears to be more of the latter. Instead of a focus on a tick box approach, you have different types of alerts available in your Inbox (Reminders, Sites, or e-mails). The tick acts as more of an archive button, like both Gmail and Pocket, and your Inbox becomes more of a storage area for all of these things. I honestly like the idea. I get the sense it was what Pocket were roughly aiming for with their rebrand, a “hold-all” approach. Inbox does the one-size-fits-all idea much more effectively, however.
The whole idea of Inbox also brings to mind using it as your primary, here-and-now workspace. A massive cache of “read later” saves wouldn’t feel at home on Inbox. The interface encourages quick scanning of e-mails to check there’s nothing important before you hit the archive button. I get the feeling it is meant to be empty, in its ideal state. It is begging you to check those e-mails, complete those tasks, in its design. Which is a pretty brilliant feature, almost like built-in gamification without explicitly using points, levels or anything.
My Mind Palace
Ultimately, even though it’s very likely going to become a part of my routine, it isn’t going to drag me away from Pocket any time soon. This is because it doesn’t replace the “knowledge organiser” functionality I get from Pocket; tagging and permenant archival. Google’s search could easy remove the need for either, however using tags brings me back to the folder metaphor. I can type in the tag name and have a wealth of information, arguments for or against, similar topics. I can see if I’ve actually read it or just thought it might be an interesting read from its read/unread state.
In that sense, maybe the “swollen” Pocket (no pun intended) isn’t a bad thing. It gives me something like a personal Stumbleupon stream, as well as a place to keep things that might turn out to be worth reading in the future. Pocket is most useful to me as a personal information database. This is why I continue to subscribe, and will probably continue to do so until Google offers me something like-for-like.
Save or Keep?
That’s when another bizarre service came into my vision. In trying to find more about importing my Pocket list into Google, it looks like a service called Google save has also snuck under my nose. This seems a lot closer to the kind of thing I’m looking for, with tagging included, but no site archival. It’s also quite minimal (which may not be a bad thing), and seems focused on saving images from an image search as well (less useful to me). Also, it offers no simple way of importing Pocket information.
Additionally, there is Keep. I’ve said little about Keep as it has always sat fairly awkwardly for me. It appeared around the same time as Inbox, and I guess my thoughts were it would be integrated considering the current direction. It didn’t quite offer what Evernote could. It kind of offered tasks, but not quite (again called “reminders”). I guess we’re meant to use the paradigm of each note being a task. It just felt clunky for me, not doing enough new to justify using it, but not integrating enough other Google services already do. However, it has a very pretty interface.
This leaves Google with three overlapping services (well 4 really, if tasks still exist) that don’t quite offer what I need. “Save” actually offers the closest to what I want, but does so in a very minimal interface that doesn’t seem to have had as much care put into it as its siblings. Despite that, if it somehow tapped into the Google archive to guarantee that saved version of the article is kept, it would become my new killer app. If a non-profit can allow user-initiated web page saves to their Wayback Machine, Google should certainly be in a position to offer something similar!!
It also probably highlights the disadvantage to Google’s software development process. In the old days, the difference would be that these would all be labelled as “Google Labs” productions. There it made sense for services to appear and disappear. Despite disbanding Google Labs years ago, the company still seems to have the mindset of releasing many ideas early and often. Which maybe isn’t the best way forward, without an “experimental” branding to hide behind…