Yes, I love Evernote. It is my newest obsession, and I just posted about how I think it has the potential for greatness. I also mentioned that there is still much room for improvement in Evernote’s offerings. I have been impressed with how quickly the development team puts out releases and new features so I am sure that they already have a roadmap for 2009 of enhancements. But I would like to propose a feature list of my own, some of which I am almost certain are already planned, but a couple of others they might not have thought of that I think could make a huge difference in the adoptability of the application.

1. Sharing notes with users and/or groups:
This one is a given… lots of people have been asking for it, so I’m sure it’s on the high priority list. Being able to share your Evernote notes or notebooks with other Evernote users in native format so that you can collaborate through your Evernote clients would open up a whole new realm of uses for the application and attract a lot of new users who would be interested in that feature-set by itself. It might also push a few more people over the fence in migrating from Microsoft’s OneNote and even SharePoint. This won’t be easy to figure out from a user interface design perspective, nor a security architecture design perspective, and I am very anxious to see how Evernote will implement it. But the payoff would be a big one for them so I hope it comes soon.

2. Expanding the monthly bandwidth allotment and/or allowing you to choose your data storage location:
Two related ideas here… Now that Premium subscribers have the ability to store any type of file in their notes as attachments, it makes sense to use Evernote as a single place to keep all your files and data. If that’s the case, then 500mb a month is not going to handle it for a lot of people. Either Evernote needs to allow you to “seed” your notes with a one-time upload of all your relevant files (for a one-time fee according to bandwidth) or allow you to pay more to up your monthly allotment. As an alternative, it would be nice if you could choose to store your data in a 3rd party data store like Amazon S3. That way, Evernote could offload the storage overage to another service, and you would also have even more control over your data. Evernote could be responsible for making it easy to link to that file wherever it is (and let’s face it, Amazon S3 really needs a good client anyway!).

3. Better note formatting control
There are several aspects I think are important here, and I understand the limitations of the XML format that Evernote has chosen to represent notes in, which, like most XML schemas, is intended to be very generic and define the content, not the presentation. However, this is a consumer application and consumers want things to be pretty, and because attractive things are more usable, it makes sense to offer the users some formatting options. Here are three features that I think would improve user experience a great deal:

• Canned “themes” for notes or note content: a predefined format for a content type. A good example here is code snippets, which are most readable in a mono-spaced font and, even better, with color coding for specific keywords and operators.
• The ability to add tables and other HTML formatting structures such as super and sub tags and definition lists. This could be done via the WYSIWYG editor Evernote currently uses or, for more advanced users…
• The ability to edit the HTML structure of a note. Technically it’s XHTML, but sometimes editing that is the only way to really “clean up” a note’s formatting, especially notes that are clipped from the web and get kind of crazy with the hidden (ie, unable to delete from Evernote’s editor) paragraph tags and other formatting. It would be nice to be able to just go in and simplify the HTML without having to battle the editor.

Here are a couple of features I want and think would put Evernote over the top, but which I’d be surprised if they’re considering…

4. Linking and embedding notes:
Before I found Evernote I was a TiddlyWiki addict. I was totally enamored with the javascript implementation of micro-content in a wiki-like HTML based data storage application. One of the beautiful features of TiddlyWiki is that you can create a link from one tiddler (the term for note) to any other tiddler. You can create tiddlers that are basically catalogs of other tiddlers and you can also embed tiddlers in other tiddlers. The embedded tiddlers can be displayed as full or partial content, in tabs, or in collapsible panels. It is a very intuitive way to navigate and organize your data. If Evernote took TiddlyWiki’s example and gave users the functionality to treat their notes as micro-content, it would finally be a contender to OneNote in the actual functionality of taking and organizing notes (which, ironically, is not currently Evernote’s strong suit!).

5. Extendable clients (let us make plug-ins!):
I am sure that every Evernote user has their own list of features they’d like to see the development team focus on. Releasing an API is a great step in offloading some of that development effort from Evernote’s developers, since now you can develop your own client for Evernote. The problem is that most people don’t want to develop a whole new client. The Windows, Mac, and iPhone clients already do 90% of what most people want and need, but they’d like to add another feature. Mozilla figured this problem out a long time ago by allowing people to develop plug-ins for their web browsers. If Evernote could make their clients able to integrate with plug-ins, they would open up a huge amount of possibilities. It would generate customer loyalty by giving people their pet features faster. It would generate geek-cred by letting developers bling out Evernote with their pet projects. And it would potentially offset even more development effort from Evernote’s team and allow them pick and choose the best new stuff to integrate into future releases. A win-win for everyone.

Finally, here are a few more nice-to-have features that don’t need much explanation:

• The ability to edit notes (especially todo checklist notes) in the mobile web client
• Notebooks that can be nested
• An app for the Android G1
• The ability to comment on public notes (why not make Evernote an alternative to a blog??)
• The ability to specify tags when adding notes via email and/or specify auto-tags when email received from particular address.
• The ability to encrypt a whole note, and a whole notebook
• PDF preview thumbnails on the web client (especially public notebooks)

That covers my main Evernote feature wishlist. I would love to see some of these things added to Evernote in 2009 and if they are they will make an already great application even more awesome. If you have other ideas please leave them in the comments, or if you are on FriendFeed join our Evernote Addicts group and post your thoughts.

Update [01/01/2009]: I recieved a newsletter from Evernote with some promising information. Looks like I might get a few things on my list, especially #1:

Dear Evernoters,

Thank you for making 2008 a great year for Evernote! I wanted to let you know about some of the things you can expect from us in 2009. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Think of it as our top New Year’s Resolutions, except unlike my resolution to learn the harpsichord, we’ll actually get these done!

….

Ok, on to the plans for ‘09:

1. Sharing and Collaboration

The public notebooks functionality that we launched in 2008 was a timid, first step in our ambitious plans for making Evernote a great tool for sharing your memories and collaborating with your friends and coworkers. In 2009, we’re going to greatly expand what you can do with your memories, documents, files, photos and anything else you throw into Evernote. If you’re the social type, we’re going to grow up from being your external brain to being a telepathic-mutant-super-brain, but with good manners. Of course, you’ll always have the option to keep any or all of your info totally private.

2. More Mobile Phones

We’ll be adding new Evernote native clients for a bunch of popular mobile phones. Right now, Evernote works great with iPhone or Windows Mobile devices. All other types of phones can use our mobile web and email interface ( http://www.evernote.com/m ), which is good for reading notes, but not as slick or full-featured as the native clients. If you’re hankering for the full Evernote experience on your favorite phone, there’s a good chance that you’ll get it in 2009.

Hopefully the Android G1 is on that list of phones to get Evernote clients this year. Exciting stuff!

The email also included the generic

4. Even Better Desktop Clients
6. Third-Party Apps
7. More Premium Features

Any of which could encompass some of my other requests above… so I’ll just wait and see, and cross my fingers.

Otavo is a new collaborative information discovery and repository site that I’ve found myself addicted to recently. I heard about it on Pete’s review of the service on Mashable, and it sounded a lot like my favorite new community, FAQQLY, so I had to check it out. But Otavo turns out to be almost the opposite of FAQQLY. Where FAQQLY is a community site that encourages people to get to know people by asking questions and has the side effect of being able to gather knowledge and information, Otavo is about searching for information by turning questions into Quests and throwing in a bit of socialization on the side.

To participate, a Quest is created by a user that other users can subscribe to either to monitor the responses or to provide answers in the form of urls and/or comments. Otavo provides a browser bookmarklet tool called the Floster that makes adding links to quests when you’re surfing a relatively simple affair. Once you’ve joined a quest, you receive email notifications if anyone adds links to it. Otavo also provides points to members for actions such as creating quests, adding links to quests, posting on the forums and inviting others to join the service. Users can also create a network of buddies on the site and even keep a blog, but there is not too much of a social aspect beyond that at this point so isn’t a community as of yet. Otavo is a good excuse, however, for me to share some of the 3500+ urls that I’ve saved in Del.icio.us, Furl.net and a couple of other bookmarking services with people who are looking for that information. In fact, over five days of questing, I hit the #1 contributor spot mainly from adding links to other people’s Quests from my archives.

So while Otavo has a lot of potential, there are still some improvements that could be made, in my opinion, to make it even more useful, user-friendly and fun:

• Links on Quests should be rateable, so that it is easy to see what links were helpful to the Quest.
• Users should receive points if their links are highly rated.
• Users should be able to comment on links in the Quest in addition to commenting on the Quest as a whole.
• A way to easily import links from bookmarking services like Del.icio.us should be provided. I may have many relevant links that could be useful on a Quest but it is time consuming and cumbersome to go to Del.icio.us, open a link, open the Floster, copy my description and tags to the Floster and save, close the window and repeat for several more links. Maybe the Floster could recognize when you are on a Del.icio.us page and add a link next to your posts so that you could just click on the link to grab the information. Since the Floster is a DHTML/Javascript floating form on the page anyway, that wouldn’t be impossible.
• Points for creating a Quest should be removed or reduced. This only encourages people to create bogus quests.
• Points should be awarded to creators of popular Quests as they gain popularity. Popularity can be determined by number of people joining the Quest or number of links and comments provided or both. Possibly one point for each person, link or comment added.
• RSS feeds should be available for Quests themselves, users’ Quest lists, and possibly for the tags that links on Quests can be categorized under.
• Adding a link that you’ve already shared with another Quest should pick up the information (description and tags) that you shared before to save you the trouble of entering it again.
• Somehow, picking which quest to add a link to in the Floster needs to be made easier… Once you’ve participated in more than 10 Quests, the list gets too long to scroll through efficiently (the questions are too long to scan easily). Also, it seems sporadic as to whether the Floster “remembers” the last Quest I added a link to, and that has caused me to have to go move links around later that ended up on the wrong Quests.
• Quests with little participation should be “promoted” in some way to make them more likely to be picked up on. If they get buried under the popular Quests, then some of the “harder” Quests might be overlooked by the ones that are easy to answer and therefore popular. Possibly there could be a list of the least participated Quests to browse through.

Overall, I have found Otavo to be a pretty compelling service and if they will add some or all of the suggestions above, then it could really be outstanding and useful. Since its still new and only been in public beta for a short while, hopefully that means the Otavo team is still in the feedback and development stage and there is more to come. I’ll be watching as it evolves and trying to defend my status as King (Queen?) of the Quest hill!