If you believe the rumors, Google’s been working on a cloud-based drive for your computer since 2005. Code-named “Platypus” and also known as GDrive, it was supposed to arrive long ago, as I wrote over at TG Daily in January 2009. Today’s article by TechCrunch asserts that the search company may be close to launching Gdrive, based on code hooks discovered in Chrome that point to the drive.google.com URL:
Diving a bit deeper into the code reviews, what’s most striking is that drive.google.com doesn’t appear to be referenced anywhere besides this one exposed ticket. This suggests that it’s either no big deal, or that Google is keeping this very secret.
TechCrunch also reminds us of Steven Levy’s book “In The Plex” which describes how Google+ lead Bradley Horowitz “convinced Google’s top executives not to launch” Gdrive back in 2008 because he felt “the concept of a ‘file’ was outdated”.
What remains unclear is whether the cloud drive will be limited only to Chromebook users or rolled out across all Google services. Speculating further, some hope Gdrive will be a standalone service allowing for easy syncing between a user’s hard drive and the Google cloud. Google, of course, offers limited cloud storage for Picasa albums, Google documents, Gmail email messages and so forth, but you can purchase additional storage, starting at twenty gigabytes for just five bucks a year to the one terabyte for $256 a year deal and upwards.
Hope so, I like Dropbox but I'm running out of space so I'd like a bit extra cloud storage!
I hope so too. All the iSheep will be talking about their "iCloud" from now on, when the capabilities have already existed with Google services and Android, but not integrated under one moniker. Google can't let this opportunity slip!