The Evernote Trunk: a game changer?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jul 15, 2010 at 07:42 AM

Evernote announced yesterday the “Trunk”, which allows Evernote users to access, from within the desktop client, about a hundred (and growing) list of tools that complement the Evernote platform. The tools include mobile applications, web services and hardware. They also include content, in the form of third party “notebooks” that one may add to their collection. Find the announcement here: http://blog.evernote.com/2010/07/14/the-evernote-trunk/

Two points that in my opinion make this a potential game changer:

- I have written in the past that I believe users are coming to expect contemporary information management applications to be cross-platform (including mobile) and web-aware (sync’d and accessible via web). The Evernote approach allows just about any application to fulfill both conditions, by linking to Evernote through its API; i.e. a mobile application can use Evernote as its database and thus provide access to users both via desktop and web. At this point, there’s not much excuse for staying on a single platform.

- Evernote is far from perfect, but I think it’s the first to provide an attractive information-management solution that is so accessible and open—for free. It is in a very privileged position: it has more than three million users, and a rapidly expanding ecosystem of tools that work with it. It is quite possibly the Facebook of information management.

In my view, it is very difficult for (non-specialist) applications to compete with such offerings.