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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

Read more | Comments (0) | November 28th, 2007

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.

platypus