(Part 1 – People are using Notion for all sorts of stuff)
Now Google Docs has long had the ability to publish a document to the web. Over five yers ago when I ran the consumer banking business at the payments company Citrus Pay, I published job descriptions as public Google Docs documents. The URL didn’t matter because they were going to be linked to from job boards and WhatsApp groups, and I wrapped them in a URL shortener in any case.
More recently I used a set of public Evernote pages to rapidly prototype some web content that the Cube Wealth app linked to. It took the team minutes to create and publish – web pages would have taken hours.
Both of these examples worked well because the focus was the content, not the appearance. In fact, the simpler the layout of the page, the more effective the page.
But in terms of content, both are both ultimately document-oriented tools. They are built on the printer-era Microsoft Word model – even Evernote. They’re adequate for publishing long-form single-column simply-formatted text, with images and links embedded [1].
Which means they fall short when you want to use them for other, more capable web properties. You need another tool that maintains the tight feedback loop between editing and publishing, but adds flexibility in layout and in displaying other types of content beyond text.
(Part 3 – Notion)
[1] Evernote excels not in its display of output but in the ease of getting information in and making it organisable and searchable.