Unlike Evernote, Springpad is a completely cloud-based service, and it went through a nasty few days during the recent . Like other Web services that depended on Amazon's servers (such as Quora and Reddit), Springpad was completely down for about two days -- and its users didn't have local use of their data. Disconcerting, to say the least.

To its credit, the company was very careful to during the downtime, telling them exactly what happened, explaining how to back up their data and describing what it will do to prevent a similar incident in the future.

Springpad is completely free; it currently doesn't offer a premium service.