I'm a Google home-page person, and my home-page is personalised with my calendar, local weather information, a couple of news feeds and my RSS reader. Recently I've added two Google products namely, Google Notebook and Google Groups.
Google Notebook is probably at least a year old and provides a good, online, alternative to products like Surfulater, Together or Yojimbo and even Circus Ponies Notebook.
Google Notebook has an extension to make clipping information from the web easier.
Google Groups is a new offering allowing online collaboration. I've played with it a little bit, setting up a couple of groups for church. It's not dissimilar to setting up a private online wiki, something I've also tried used wikidot.com.
If you collaborate a lot, then these online tools are probably of more use that the software you'd run on your own machine. They also have the clear advantage of being able to access your information from anywhere that you can connect to the internet. Of course for some this is the best reason for not using an online tool! And, of course, Google tools are free. The downside for me of these two products is that they do not support Safari, my preferred browser. Das, but not insurmountable.
Stephen Fry wrote recently that he saw a day coming when we will all work using open source tools and software. Perhaps wikis, groups, readers and notebooks are a step towards this.
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