Google recently added Notebook to their ever-increasing array of web services. It is basically a direct competitor to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services, and aims to allow you to better keep track of sites/links that are important to you, and access them from any computer while also allowing you to share them with others.

It requires a plugin, and then once that’s installed, you can simply right-click any page you’re at to add it to your Google Notebook. In Firefox, a link is also put in the lower right-hand corner in your status bar, for quick access to your Notebook. While it’s pretty neat, and easy as well, it doesn’t really offer anything new and improved over existing services, beyond the Google brand name. It’s also worthwhile to note that the service (as of yet), doesn’t support tagging.

Del.icio.us is still a dominant force, and as Mike Arrington points out, Google Notebook’s functionality seems to blend with or completely cover that of their Bookmarks service, leaving its future questionable. Google Bookmarks was a useful service, as evidenced by the number of Firefox extensions available for it. It just seems that Google should have worked on improving Bookmarks instead of going out and making this whole new service – could compartmentalization have been the cause of this?

However, this service should make some headway, if only because of the Google name. There are still a lot of people out there who don’t use a service like this, and maybe with the Google name behind it more will be prompted to sign on – after all, who doesn’t want better access and control over their bookmarks? It’s interesting to watch as these “Web 2.0” services evolve to better allow people to manage and share important parts of the huge behemoth of information that is the Internet.

As a footnote, it’s interesting to note that Yahoo! continues to develop their My Web 2.0 social bookmark service, even after acquiring del.icio.us at the end of 2005.