GDrive: Possible Game Changer?
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Mobile, Web
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the forthcoming online storage service from Google. Call it GDrive, call it Platypus — the vast majority of tech bloggers seem to think it old news. I feel there could be a lot of potential for Google’s storage offering to be a game-changing product.
It appears that the GDrive will sit on your desktop and sync files automatically with online storage. Those files will be accessible from the desktop and browser at least as easily as they would be on your own hard drive.
Here are three ways this could be huge:
- Your files will become computable on a massive scale
The difference between local and online storage in this case will not just be the absence of space limitations, the data will also be accessible to the nearly infinite computing power of Google. Both individual users and in anonymous aggregation, there’s magic that’s possible when our data is so accessible to unlimited processing power. - Mobile Access
The article includes some of the first discussion of mobile access to GDrive files. Seamless syncing of data assets between desktop access and mobile access could change the mobile landscape in a big way. Combine this with what could turn out to be a flourishing ecosystem of mobile apps via Android, and perhaps the promise of OpenSocial, and you’ve got some powerful new mobile social networking opportunities. - Gears + GDrive = Awesome
Do all of the above, on a plane. Someday Google will notice that I’ve got a trip scheduled on GCal and offer to sync up my recent GDrive files to Gears for the journey. Especially if I’ve been searching a lot on locations far away on Google Maps of late.The Gears functionality of quickly making files local and them syncing them back up when you get back online is going to be a huge deal. Combine Gears with effectively infinite storage and computing power and you’ve got a lot of possibilities!
It’s easy to be cynical about the details coming from the WSJ. It’s easy to wonder whether Google will ever bring its storage product to market, whether it can be trusted given the number of times its own company blogs have been hacked, and whether it’s even a good idea given the near omniscience the company will soon possess. I feel, though, that important new information is coming out about the GDrive and the product will play a fundamentally different role in our lives than existing products in the same space purport to.
Tags: android, gdrive, mobile access, mobile apps, storage service
The GDrive Is Here… Maybe
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
Google’s long rumoured but never delivered online storage product GDrive (code name Platypus) may finally be on its way, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Google declined to comment on specific online storage plans aside from "storage is an important component of making Web applications fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives."
As it has been noted before, Google offers a number of storage options within many of its current suite of online tools, allowing users to store email, photos, office documents and blog posts. The new storage service will end up tying together some of the services through a single search box, instead of having to switch between different system interfaces (or download client-side solutions such as Google Desktop).
Pricing details for the service are not yet announced, but the WSJ indicates that there will likely be free and paid version available.
There can be no doubt that this service is one of the most anticipated tools since the GPhone, so much that is prompted a number of hacks to the GMail system to simulate the imagined functionality of the service. It is far more likely, however, that when the GDrive system does come to fruition that it will end up working a lot more like an overlay to existing file management utilities, as opposed to an extension to the local file system on the client computer.
Tags: gdrive, google, platypus, storage product
The Social Graph & Beyond
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Mobile, Semantic, Web
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision.
Berners-Lee positions the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Time labelled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!
Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (aka layers of abstraction):
- The Internet: links computers
- Web: links documents
- Graph: links relationships between people and documents — "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.
The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:
So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.
Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "… at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google’s OpenSocial aims to achieve.
What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:
Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline side, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.
I’m very please Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What he wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.
Tags: graph, semantic web, tim berners lee, web vision
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
