People seem to be comparing the newly-launched Google Notebook to del.icio.us, but it seems that a better comparison would be to sites like Clipmarks, or perhaps 37signals’ Backpack.

A lot of the criticism of Notebook focuses on the fact that (so far) it doesn’t support tagging of clippings. You can maintain multiple notebooks, and when you “note” something you assign it to one of those notebooks; but a clipping can’t belong to more than one notebook (or category) at the same time. I’m not sure that that’s a showstopper for me, when I think about how I’m likely to use Notebook. It is true that for my del.icio.us bookmarks, I typically assign multiple tags to a bookmark, and I rely on those tags to help me “find” links that I’ve tucked away. With Notebook, however, I’ll have access to Google’s search technology to search in my notebooks, and I anticipate that I’ll be able to find the clipping that I’m looking for at least as quickly as I would have using tags.

Another problem with Notebook is that there’s no mechanism for providing a “feed” of your notebook for others to subscribe to. I’m guessing that this shortcoming will be addressed by Google in short order, and again, it’s not really a showstopper for me.

So have you tried Notebook yet? What are your impressions?