Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators: Evernote as Memex

Among Jon Udell*'s Interviews with Innovators is this one with Evernote's Phil Lubin ...

... Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he's back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article "As We May Think."...

I criticized Evernote recently for a 'complete fail' on the first test I apply to anything that will manage my extended memory -- can I move the data ...

Gordon's Tech: Evernote fails the critical software as service import/export test

...So Evernote is not an option for my Palm to iPhone conversion, and I'd say it's not an option for anyone on any platform until they demonstrate Data Freedom...

Phil Libin responded in a comment:

Data Freedom is vital to our plans. We're serious about Evernote as an "external brain" and that means users have to have confidence that their memories will always be accessible. Part of that accessibility is making sure that users can import/export Evernote data in standard formats with no restrictions. Our current limitations on import/export capabilities are due to developer resource constraints, not any philosophical or business reasons; we can't afford to do import/export poorly because that could muck with your data and flood our support lines. Doing it well takes time.

We're currently testing a full set of Evernote APIs that will give people a lot of options for getting data in and out. We'll roll these out publicly later in the summer. We'll also be expanding the structured import/export capabilities on the local clients, though I don't have a specific date on that yet. We're doing this because data freedom is good for more than just peace of mind - it'll let us build lots of great functionality that we couldn't accomplish with a "walled garden" approach.

Now that I know Evernote is explicitly targeting the Memex/Xanadu vision, I'm even more interested in the product/service -- but I'm also even more demanding.

Even if I trust Mr. Libin completely after listening to the interview with Jon, it's too risky for me to adopt Evernote without a demonstrated, working, export capability. Heck, Evernote could be acquired tomorrow and Mr. Libin could retire the next day! The new owner might be more enchanted with customer lock-in than with changing the world.

Realistically, of course, almost nobody but me is really going to worry about this prior to signing up. Evernote would be silly to divert resources to accelerate import/export -- it's far more important for their market that they enhance the iPhone client.

I'm just sorry I won't get to play with them until they have an export tool. I'll be watching closely though ...

* I'm a longtime fan of Jon Udell's, and I recently had the pleasure of chatting with him. Oddly enough, he sounds exactly the way I'm imagined.