Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m marginally excited!
Why?
Because Evernote’s rolling out new features.
They announced them a few weeks back and we’re seeing them steadily now put into the mainstream.
So the features that we’re going to take a look at today, one of them I think is really
important.
The other one is going to be kind of useful.
But the really important one is Evernote Work Chat.
The question is: do we need another chat interface?
Do we need another way to communicate outside of email with people we collaborate with?
That’s a darn good question.
Evernote’s posing it to us and they’re offering us a solution built right into Evernote.
The other is only for premium users, only for those of you who’ve decided to pony
up the $45 a year for the premium version of Evernote and it’s contextual based searching
or context searching that they’ve added that looks outside of Evernote when you do
a search inside of Evernote.
Pretty cool idea.
We’ll see how useful it is but we’re going to cover both those new features today on
DottoTech.
Now Evernote is becoming increasingly a tremendous collaborative tool.
I’ve talked so often in the past about how we use it to collect all of the information
and store all of our little bits of data but now I’m finding that more and more I’m
using it to collaborate on different projects.
Case in point, the note that you see here.
Now I’m in the Evernote web interface with their fancy, new, minimized version and I’m
working on a new webinar with my buddy, Mike Varty, and we’re going to be doing a webinar
around choosing a task manager.
So this is a note that we’ve shared and we’ve been working on collaboratively back
and forth.
This is a great way to collaboratively build any type of content.
It’s very similar to what you might do in Google Docs but now we’re starting to do
it an awful lot more in Evernote.
But Evernote announced a few weeks back that they’re going to incorporate a chat feature.
Now this chat feature is really interesting.
What it does is it allows us to take any of our notes that we’re working on and now
when we click on the Share icon here, instead of the old school sharing, we now have the
ability to take it and share it through a chat interface with others.
See this, if we take a look—let me just go back here—now I’m in the web interface.
I should point out I’m in the web interface right now.
Old school Evernote, I’m going to click on the dropdown box and this is where we could
actually kind of share the note, copy the link and share it as a URL, that sort of stuff
that we do before.
But now by clicking in the middle part here, we have the ability to actually take this
note and be able to incorporate it into a chat going back and forth.
Now I’ve only got two people enrolled in my chat right now.
But if I click here in the To list and start typing in any name—I’ll just start typing
in myself—you’ll see what will happen is quickly it will come up and it’s actually
sourcing all of my different contacts from my Google Contacts.
So you can access anybody in your address book with this chat.
Now this is how it looks in this, in the web interface.
I’m just going to scroll across.
This is the app.
Now I’m running the app on my Mac, so it might look a little bit different in Windows.
I haven’t looked at it yet in Windows.
But here we’ve got again two areas where we can invoke chat.
We can click here on New Chat just by clicking on the very top menu bar now and so we can
actually start just a chat going back and forth with anybody.
This is a chat.
This is like SMSing on your phone or text messaging on your phone.
You create that kind of a chat string going back forth relating to whatever note you’re
working on.
Additionally here on the Share icon, if I click on share, once again it pops out and
gives me the chat, the same Work Chat interface.
If I click on the dropdown menu, that gives me the one that I’m used to seeing which
allows me to copy this link and share the link so that I can actually share that note.
So we see now how it’s being incorporated.
It’s all brand new.
I only rolled it out last night and I just invited one person to chat, Mike Varty, and
he hasn’t gotten back to me so I don’t have a chat to show you but I think you’ve
got an idea of how it can fit.
The big question is going to be whether or not there’s value in chatting right within
and staying right within this interface because if you think about how we typically communicate,
we might be sending an email relating to it, we might put notes within the note, there’s
a lot of different ways that we’ve communicated before using Evernote so we’ll see if this
chat becomes all that valuable.
My concern is that we now carry on conversations in so many places.
You might send an email.
You might use this type of chat.
You might be using another service like Skype or something like that and you might be carrying
on a chat in Skype.
Certainly within Gmail, there’s the Skype and there’s the chat interface right within
the Google Apps.
We also communicate back and forth just within our task managers when we share notes within
our task managers.
So there are all of these different places now that conversations can reside so as you
start to incorporate this kind of tool, you really have to think about setting up some
kind of a standard of consistently communicating with people in the same interface.
Oh I forgot about Facebook.
Increasingly, I’m seeing people chat back and forth in Facebook as well.
So there are all of these different places that we can.
Here’s another one.
I like the idea of doing it in Evernote but I’m a wee little bit concerned that it might
cause us some issues as we lose threads of conversations.
I’ve shown it to you in the web interface.
That was the web interface right there.
I’ve shown it to you in the app interface.
Let’s show it to you in the mobile interface as well.
That’s my Android phone.
Let me just call up my iPhone here so you can see it in both and let me just share the
screen of the iPhone while I’m talking.
Chat amongst yourselves while I do this.
There we go.
It should pop up now.
Where’s my iPhone?
There it is.
How rude.
It jumped right on top of the poor Android phone.
It always does that.
Apple always does that.
Did you notice that?
All right, so here we are now in our iPhone and you see right there at the top, there
is the Chat interface, I tap on that I have the same options.
So I can now chat with Mike and other people.
So you’ve got the cha built into the iPhone and if we take a look in the Android phone
here, we see the chat interface engaged in the main menu bar as well here.
When I click on that, see out comes the same chat interface.
So we can create chats in each of these environments.
Now we should note that Evernote obviously thinks that this chat is a big deal.
How can we tell?
They’ve installed the icon in the main menu bar of three of the interfaces of at least
of the app—and it might end up in the web one as well—and the mobile platforms as
well.
So Evernote obviously considers that this chat feature is going to be something that
is really important we’re going to use and they are trumpeting it quite loudly to everybody.
Now the other feature that they’ve got is only available to premium users and that is
the idea of what they call context searching.
So if I’m searching here—let me just type in Facebook marketing; let’s see if I can
find something that there—so I type in Facebook Marketing and it comes up with this suggested
notes but when I go down to the bottom of the note, of the response of the search, we
see context-sensitive searching.
So we see all of the different places that it’s found it.
Some of the search has come back within my own Evernote account.
But look out here, it’s also found all these articles from Tech Crunch, from Fast Company
and from other places as well.
Now where this is all managed, the idea is that it’s going to give you context of what’s
happening out there in the kind of the buzz that’s happening in the online world relating
to whatever it is you’re searching for.
So if we go into the Preferences, we see here now we have new menu item called Context.
Now this is only available to premium users.
But this, if we click here on Manage Context Sources, it’s going to then launch our web
browser and here it’s going to tell us where it’s sourcing information from.
So in this particular case, it’s sourcing it from these journals or these online properties
as well as looking for people that have mentioned this content in LinkedIn.
And you can connect or disconnect the comments coming from LinkedIn.
So I think over time, this context sourcing of additional information might end up being
valuable, especially for those of us that do a lot of searching within Evernote because
we’ve got so much content within Evernote.
This is very similar to what Evernote has done for a long time with the Web Clipper,
actually for a little while, shall I say, with the web clipper.
Let me show you.
If I was going to do a new search in Evernote— Actually, before I do that this is a new browser
that I’ve just setup and I bet you it’s not setup.
Oh here’s a warning opportunity for us.
If you installed the Evernote Web Clipper and you go here into the Evernote Web Clipper,
you go into the Options in the Evernote Web Clipper—this is within your Extensions within
your web browser—if you look down here, this is something that you have to turn on.
But boy, you should turn it on.
I always turn it on.
See right here, you click and turn that on.
The reason it’s not turned on is that I’ve just installed a new computer that I’m working
on here today.
It’s called Related Results and let me show you what happens.
A little bit of magic happens when we do that.
So I think that should be saved just as it is.
So now what happens is when we do the search—let’s do the same search; let’s do Facebook marketing—not
only do we get the results from Google when we do the search but you see here that we
get the results from our Evernote account.
It actually looks into our Evernote account and it pulls any related search that is based
on that search criteria.
So they’ve added this context.
It’s kind of the flipside of that same equation where instead of now when we’re in Evernote
and searching, we’ll find web-related content.
If you turn this on with the Evernote Web Clipper, if you turn on this menu when you’re
doing web searches, it takes a look inside Evernote and returns that in related search
information.
Pretty cool, I think.
So two new features on Evernote.
The jury is out on one, which is are we actually going to use that chat?
It looks great to have but is it something that we’re going to be able to use?
The second is the context searching which is a great idea, unfortunately just for premium
users which I’m one so I get to take advantage of it.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this and found this video today to be useful.
If you have, don’t forget that you can stay in touch with us three ways here on DottoTech.
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That’s it for today!
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!