Photo by Arria Belli.

I've been a fan of Springpad and used it - mostly - to save bookmarks and some notes. I've now switched to Evernote, as the former is quite buggy, especially the web interface (which is the main one). Funnily enough, their Android app is very good. On the other hand, Evernote's web app is simply non-existent.

Anyway, I've been saving hundreds of bookmarks over the last year or so. You know, the "I'm going to need this later" line of thought that forces you to save just about anything.

The problem is that I've never searched my bookmarks. Not even once. That's because when I'm looking for something, I don't remember whether I've bookmarked something related to it. After all, we save things so we don't have to remember them, right? It's a vicious circle that makes me just assume I don't have any bookmark, and I end up using Google. This is kind of transparent. It's my subconscious that makes the decision to ditch my bookmark collection, it's not a rational mind action.

My conscious conclusion is that my subconscious is totally right.

After all, Google has several advantages over bookmarking apps. The first is speed. No app known to man is faster than Google. Another one is relevancy to what you're looking for right now, which is different from what I was looking for a week ago. Last but not least, Google has invaluable up-to-date results, because I might have bookmarked something good, but chances are that it's outdated or simply there's something better out there.

So, taking notes is useful, saving plain, stand-alone bookmarks is a waste of time.