Happy Birthday to 2 Great Services: Evernote and Google+

This week marks the birthday of two great services that I love and use heavily on my iPad and elsewhere: Evernote and Google+.

Evernote has been a stalwart for me since back in 2008 – on the iPhone and Mac, clipping from the web, and just about anywhere I’ve needed it. To say it’s a powerful and feature-packed notes app is still not coming close to doing it justice. I’ve seen Evernote spoken about as a ‘second brain’ sort of service and I have gotten that sort of benefit from it over the years. It remains a fixture for me across all my devices and is still constantly improving and adding features.

Google+ is only two years old, and it feels like that time has flown by, as they say. I was lucky enough to get an invite from +Louis Gray on the first night the beta became open to invites and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of Google+ ever since.

Yes, I’ve read all the reports of Google+ being a ghost town, and I think they’re complete nonsense. It has become easily my favorite social network. It is superb for lively and intelligent discussions on just about any topic under the sun, has a great range of topic-specific communities where you can focus in on areas of interest, and Hangouts for connecting via video with anything from one to hundreds of people. I have lots of good discussion every day via my personal profile and the iPad Insight Google+ page.

Here’s wishing both of these great services many happy returns.