Springpad’s just dropped version 3.0 of their productivity suite, launching the public, collaborative notebooks I’ve been anticipating for some time.  The update brings them one step closer to matching certain functions of Evernote while differentiating their tools around actionability, making for one extremely useful tool.  I’ve taken to using Springpad on a daily basis, curating websites, notes, recipes, products, movies, tasks and events, and 3.0 combines their earlier goals around the socialized Facebook integration with an even broader discovery platform for sharing.  What’s great about this release is it’s available simultaneously across all its access points, including the web, iOS and Android apps.

Social notebooks

The entire Springpad experience has been rebooted, centering around collaboration and shared notebooks.  Similar to Pinterest, you can follow a person’s entire collection or individual notebooks.  When you login you’ll see recent activity from notebooks you’re following, as well as featured notebooks from across the Springpad network.

And if you’re familiar with Pinterest you’ll note another similarity–Springpad’s become even more visual with the presence of collaborative, public notebooks.  Each notebook theme can be customized, and Springpad does an excellent job at pulling images from a bookmarked site to represent a springed item.  From there you can choose the cover photo for your notebook, tailoring your collection and promoting individual springs.

Social search

Search has always been an important aspect of Springpad’s network, helping you find public springs of interest and creating actions around them.  With the new notebook format, you have even more control over your resources.  Notebooks and the entire Springpad network can be searched, and you can add an item to one of your own notebooks (which can be public or private).

The search bar itself has also been updated–it’s now “universal.”  That means you can add a bookmark directly from the search bar, which is handy when you have the URL.  Springpad will search the web, pull the necessary metadata and create a bookmark, which can be customized and filed away on the spot.

Social actions

If you’re a Springpad user you know that there’s a handful of actions you can take around a given bookmark, and this is only enhanced with version 3.0.  A springed movie, for instance, will pull up Rotten Tomato reviews, local showtimes and an option to add your own audio or video commentary.

These actions have evolved into more collaboration with version 3.0, as you can now add collaborative text notes to a springed item to share with friends or colleagues.  This is a basic form of document-sharing designed to add more function to a bookmark, which can be used for a variety of purposes with the new sharing format.  This enables Springpad to straddle the consumer and business sides of online sharing, and provide more value around its core productivity tools.

Must-have: cloud collaboration

Everything on Springpad’s been made more collaborative, in fact, and that’s what makes this update so significant.  We’re seeing a number of cloud tools and services layering in collaboration as value-added features, and it’s a welcome addition to Springpad’s existing curation platform.  In today’s era of real-time sharing and data access, curation has become not only a necessity but a skill.  Springpad 3.0 makes curation drop-dead simple, and makes it all the more worthwhile with social integration and great aesthetics.

We’ve been playing around with Springpad already, so to get a glimpse of the promise of Springpad’s new collaborative notebooks, check out some of my favorites: here’s a collection of our Snapshot Profile interview series, and here you’ll find some stunning visualization of big data projects.