Springpad is in the air, with a seasonable update to its smart notebook service.  Version 4.0 of its cross-platform note-taking app comes with a fresh look, improved search, and embeddable notebooks (see ours below).  I’ll tell you right now, my favorite new features are the embeddable notebooks and the revamped home page, which makes note-management more centralized and efficient.

Taking all the right cues from YouTube

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Lets start with embeddable notebooks, a timely addition considering Piqora’s recent launch of embeddable Galleries for Pinterest content.  Something else Springpad and Piquora have in common is the monetization strategy behind embeddable content, both crafted with advertisers in mind.  Just like a YouTube clip, Springpad’s embddable notebooks service enables publishers and marketers to transport entire notebooks or collections of notebooks away from the Springpad site and  notebooks in their sites.  It’s an easy way to share collections of content, which is a dynamic extension of our curation obsession.  And as content becomes more readily organized within consumer apps, the more comprehensively it will be able to proliferate the social web.

Where Springpad differs from Piqora is the usability of these notebooks.  User-friendly, Springpad’s embeddable notebooks can be shared by any user.  And the notebook itself is interactive, especially for a logged-in Springpad user.  Viewers can subscribe to a notebook directly from the embed, subscribe to mobile and email alerts for notebook updates, and grab the embed code directly.

Springpad’s teamed with some 15 brands and publishers on the embeddable notebooks, including Glamour magazine, TrapAdvisor, Snooth, Wayfair and more.

Here’s an example of an embeddable notebook I created, collecting SiliconAngle’s top stories from the recently concluded Strata conference on Big Data:

Action Search – a new launch pad for Springpad

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As far as the updated homepage goes, it’s more activity driven.  You can sort notebooks by those you’ve created or those with collaborators, and it’s also easier to navigate recent activity from those you follow.  You can see your personal activity on the new Springs page, where you can quick-edit titles, tag words, notebooks and more.

Which leads us to Springpad’s new search.  This is where Springpad has put the most effort into wizen up its Smart App, anticipating your needs.  Search for a movie, and results are sorted by the type of movie you’re most likely looking for — one that’s available for immediate streaming on a service like Netflix.  The next section will show you movies available for rent, followed by flicks playing in nearby theaters.

And similar to Facebook’s new Graph Search, Springpad’s getting users started with the new search tool by cuing up some starter categories, for movies, recipes, music, places and more.

Of course, Springpad’s always been about actionizing content, imbuing a note-taking app with productivity features, bookmarking capabilities, automated organization, tasks, calendar integration and countless other perks.  I’m glad to see Springpad honing in on its search function, as this will be an important jump-off point for personalized recommendations and other consumer services.   To that end, Springpad is casting a wide net with mainstream appeal.

“Personalized Consumption is a little about what we’ve been looking at as we position ourselves for a mainstream audience,” says Springpad co-founder Jeff Janer, explaining the reason behind his far friendlier term.  “We can’t use the term ‘consumer services.’  We have to explain the benefits, not structured data.”

It’s been nearly a year since Springpad launched version 3.0, an update that centered primarily on social collaboration: it introduced public notebooks, social search and the activity feed, which lets you browse updates in notebooks you’re following.  The v3.0 search bar was the predecessor of Actions Search. It enabled users to bookmark and customize notebooks directly without doing any unnecessary tapping or clicking.

written by: Kristen Nicole & Maria Deutscher