Service offers notes and bookmarks through any browser

Google's Notebook service, which allows web users to store and compile links to web sites, favourites, and snippets of information while browsing, went live last week as a beta.

Although Google had already announced the service the web site was delivering error reports until early this week. Now visitors to the domain are asked to sign in to their account and then download the small piece of software that enables some features.

With the download, right clicking on a section of text accesses “Note this”, a feature that saves clippings to the notebook. And the mini Google Notebook allows access the clippings file via the status bar of the user’s browser. Text and images can be saved, along with the domain from which they came.

Users will need a Google or Gmail username and password; and Firefox users will need to download version 1.5 of the browser.

Notebooks can be made private or public. Public sites will be open to search by other users, though this service is currently unavailable.