Evernote gets a whiff of wikis

Evernote, a great note-taking and productivity app and a 2009 Webware 100 editor's choice winner, is getting just a hint of multi-user capability. It has new, basic sharing features that tease at a new direction for the app/online service.

Evernote users can now share collections of pages or photos ("notebooks") with other people from the Evernote Web app. Notebooks can be shared with individuals or, as they could be before, published to their own URLs and shared with everybody on the Web.

For users of the free Evernote product, that's pretty much it. Premium (paid) users get the capability to make the notebook sharing two-way, so people shared with can write changes back to the originating notebook.

Other big limitations: The sharing features only work from the Web version of Evernote. You cannot share a notebook from the PC, Mac, or iPhone version of the app, nor can you see notebooks shared with you from those apps -- only from the Web. You can only share entire notebooks, not single pages. And there's no revision tracking.

There's certainly the possiblity that Evernote (or Microsoft compeitor OneNote) could become a kind of blended personal/group note-taking app, like a wiki. This update to the Web service isn't that, but I do like where the product seems to be going. It also appears Evernote is finally beginning to provide some features that make the paid version of the app worth it, which I am glad to see. I want this product to make it.