I'm a huge Boxee fan, but it's biggest differentiator (from XBMC, Plex, and similar forks) is also it's biggest liability.

In order to be an effective "social" media player, where titles can be shared and recognized by others, it has restrictions on the media sources. If your content isn't in IMDB, Hulu, TV Guide, or one of the other supported providers, there's no way to get it into Boxee.

The biggest offenders are TV series on DVD. Boxee understands Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Episode 5, but can't parse the DVD rip of Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Disk 2. Or, likewise, the DVD rip of Pixar's Short Films Collection (but it can parse the individual short films).

To be fair, last time I checked, none of the XBMC forks could parse these media (someone really should write a Netflix scraper plugin), but at least you could manually enter them.

For those who don't wish to spend as much time assembling and tweaking, but still want to enjoy Boxee goodness; You can buy a refurbished Mac Mini, DVIHDMI dongle, and 1tb external disk for roughly the same price as the author spent on his Ubuntu rig. Boxee is available (and started) as a native OS-X application. Plus, with OS-X, you can get streaming HD Netflix.

The wins with Boxee are:

• It's got a fairly high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) in that the UI is pretty easy to use (certainly much easier than Finder/Explorer).
• It's a "social" media player. In that it has a "friends" system like most other social sites. You can see what your friends are watching (opt-in, of course) and use that as a tool to find new content.

Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo.

I disagree. As a Google Notebook user, I found it very fast and easy to access. The cost (in clicks) of getting into a Google doc and organizing said doc after is much higher than with Notebook, plus there was an integrated FF plugin that made it very useful for clipping pages.

While Google's statement is "no new development", I think odds are that it will be shuttered completely within 24 months as other notebook services' (Evernote, Zoho) feature sets become compelling enough for existing GNotebook users to migrate, thus lessening the outcry when Google does pull the plug.

I'm sad that they're closing it down, but if you've got to end a service, this is a good course of action.