I've been testing the beta preview of Evernote v.3 for about a week now and it's turning out to be a great tool that has some uses that go way beyond what they're advertising it for.

They're calling it a "personal external memory" while in reality it's a lightweight document management application that works great for both personal and small business uses. It has consists of both a desktop and web application that can be continuously synchronized (some folders can also be defined as "local only" on the desktop side for private data you may not want out on the web).

Where Evernote really shines is that it has a built in image processor that reads text within images, no separate OCR application needed. Store an image with text in Evernote, or email it to your own special address at their website, and then Evernote indexes all printed or hand-written text within the image and makes it searchable with the rest of the text in your notes. This makes it really easy to just snap a picture with a cell phone camera of business notes from the whiteboard after a meeting or from a napkin at lunch and have those notes immediately available and accessible online. You can even share selected collections of notes from the website.

You can also use either a bookmarklet or a Firefox extension that installs with the desktop version, to clip selected text (or an entire page) from within your web browser directly into a note in only a couple of clicks. Evernote is the fastest tool yet that I've found to do this, and it's really speeding up my productivity in taking, keeping and finding notes.

I highly recommend checking Evernote out if you have a need to keep your notes in a central location, and make them very easy to find.