• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, March 21, 2013

Confirming earlier reports, Google on Thursday unveiled a new note-taking app named Google Keep. But, despite its obvious promise, Web watchers appear to be approaching Keep with caution.  

“It is a good thing that Google has decided to compete with the likes of Evernote -- it validates their market,” writes GigaOm’s Om Malik. “But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader,” Malik said, refereeing to Google’s soon-to-be slashed aggregation service.

In other words, “Given Google's ambivalent history with note-taking services, and the recent, high-profile sunsetting of Google Reader, users may be reluctant to record all their information in Keep,” according to CNet’s Casey Newton.

Indeed, “Google now has a clear enough track record of trying out, and then canceling, ‘interesting’ new software that I have no idea how long Keep will be around,” The Atlantic’s James Fallows explains.

Therefore, “Why the hell should we care about services that, like every other in the cloud, could disappear at any given moment?” Brian Proffitt asks in ReadWrite.

“This would not be Google's first foray into note taking,” Chloe Albanesius recalls in PCMag.com. “In 2009, the company announced that it would stop active development on Google Notebook. By July 2012, the service shut down and all Notebook data was transferred to Google Docs.”

“Given the context, it's hard not to wonder: Is Keep actually a long-term committed project?” asks Computerworld’s JR Raphael. “Or is it another random service we'll become invested in as users only to find on the Google ‘spring cleaning’ list a few years later?”

All that said, “From a purely technical perspective Keep seems to be a promising alternative to services like Evernote and Simplenote,” Nathaniel Mott admits in Pandodaily.