I just ran across a new Google product (new to me at least). Google Notebook is a tool that allows you to store notes and snippets on a web page for later use. The Notebook can have multiple notebooks in it for different topics, and section headers within a notebook allowing you to group your notes in a way that makes sense to you. Google of course are masters of Web UI and so they have things like drag-and-drop sorting of note entries. Double-click on a note and the editing mode magically appears before your eyes, making using the web application very simple. And of course they are all searchable.
Of course you can do similar things with other services. Backpack for example is a very interesting site. It's free for a basic subscription. You can create things like To-do lists, image galleries and notes, all of which are drag-and-drop sortable in true Web 2.0 fashion. The pay version seems to also have a number of interesting add-on features like Calendaring. I do like Backpack quite a bit. In comparison, the Google Notebook does not offer a lot of functionality. On it's own it doesn't sound that interesting does it? So why am I writing about it?
What makes it interesting is that they have created a Firefox plugin that integrates with the site. You can right-click on any page and add a "Note" to your notebook. When you do that, it saves the link in your notebook. But where it gets really interesting is you can select some HTML in your browser and save the snippet in your notebook. The plugin also adds a small status bar icon that lets you easily access your notes and also open the full Google Notebook page.
The browser integration lets you very easily save snippets of information in such a way that it doesn't break your flow, it doesn't interrupt your thought process. You don't have to switch to a different web page or a different application. I think this simplicity and efficiency make it very compelling.