Drive-In All Your Info to Google
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Written By Reprise Media | March 7, 2006 | Share This
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It’s quickly becoming the search world’s answer to Nixon’s infamous ‘18-minute gap’: notes from presentation slides shown at last week’s Google Analyst Day were leaked online, apparently by mistake; before it was purged, Greg Linden blogged about some of the info, most notably from slide 19, which mentions plans for a ‘GDrive.’ The notes read, in part:
“With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)…As we move toward the ‘Store 100%’ reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.”
Assuming it’s true - and at this point, most of us are - would people go for it? The idea of voluntarily giving personal data to Google for storage has a mixed track record. GMail, with its 1 gigabyte free email storage, is a hit; Google Desktop 3.0, whose search function requires sending hard drive information to Google for up to thirty days for indexing, was less enthusiastically received (we covered it briefly here).
Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen imagines a near future when web-based applications have largely replaced desktop software. “When that becomes reality,” he writes, “and privacy and security issues don’t get in the way, online storage is the only kind of storage that will make sense.” It’s those as yet unresolved privacy and security issues that has John Batelle saying http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=121">Garrett Rogers, who muses on where the cash is going to come from. He dismisses the idea of advertisements - wishful thinking, maybe - and proposes a subscription plan that would see users pay five bucks for every gig of storage after the first one, or perhaps a monthly DVD backup for a nominal fee.
However they plan to implement it, the GDrive revelation must mean that Google’s been paying attention to the competition. Only last week, Oracle’s Larry Ellison identified “private data” as one thing that Google doesn’t search well, and announced his intentions to outflank Big G on that front. We hope GDrive is ready for that drag race.
Topics: SEM: Paid Inclusion |