ReadWriteWeb

Back in the 1980s, one of my first publishers asked me for a quick biography paragraph to place at the end of a story. "Tell your readers about yourself," an editor said. "He fills infinite pieces of paper," I wrote. (It was the shortest piece I ever composed.)

Since that time, I've been presented with a countless number of form factors of strange components vying to replace my use of paper for keeping notes. Paper is wasteful, it gets lost, it reduces the number of trees, it consumes space. Think of how the environment would love me if I rid myself of the romance that I could record the passing parade of the world with a pencil.

Yes, it is hard to believe, but email turned 40 last month. No one can question that email has transformed the way business is conducted. According to Radicati group, the average worker processes more than a hundred daily emails, and business email accounts make up only about a quarter of the total of more than 3 billion. Sometime in the next few years, Radicati predicts that the number of IM accounts will exceed email for the first time.

Email and my own working life have been closely intertwined as well. I started using email in 1983 and over the years I have used more than three dozen different systems and sent thousands of messages. So I thought I would put together some important milestones of my own usage and show you how email has changed from those early days. In my working life, I published my first book on corporate email use (seen at left), published a weekly email newsletter and wrote many articles about various email products for dozens of publications, including this one.

Springpad, a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant.

Evernote, the popular note-taking, cataloging, and bookmarking service has been busy over the past month, cranking out a number of updates. In this short period of time, they've added support for Safari, integrated with Mac's Growl, updated the Android version, revamped their Web Clipper, and partnered up with business card and receipt scanning service Shoeboxed. Oh, and they started a podcast too.