Also see this related article, from about a year ago, declaring that Gdrive will arrive in 2008.

http://www.internetbusiness.co.uk/27112007/rumours-of-google...

"The service has the potential to eclipse even Gmail, Google's second best-known product after their google.com search engine."

YouTube?

Eclipse, how? I don't even understand that statement.

Don't people already use third party software to turn Gmail into a 'Gdrive'?

Yes: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

That's not true. It's been a huge, mainstream story. Not to mention that people writing articles about Google should know.

There doesn't seem to be any content in that article other than rampant speculation.

I'm willing to bet this won't go anywhere (at least in the US) until residential upload speeds are increased.

No offense, but tgdaily really doesn't seem the best source for computer news out there (see also the Linux girl article from the other day). Sure, online storage would be nice, but without really, really high speed internet connections, it seems doubtful that it would replace "local" drives.

Also, the way Cable/DSL are structured now with lower upload speeds, this could be painfully slow the first time it's run for people. Also, what happens when you want to sync a ripped DVD or large graphics file?

Before or after Duke Nukem Forever?

I wonder how this competes and changes (in a good way) dropbox.. or perhaps a acquisition :)

Not a competitor until they actually release it... but, it probably would make a big dent in dropboxe's sales. Either that or it would make cloud storage more popular and it would make dropbox more popular as a result.

Interesting, and I learned Microsoft has SkyDrive which I never knew about.

If I can find enough of these free services I can store more or upload the same stuff to each storage site and use them as a backup in case one of them accidentally loses my stuff.

I was pretty interested when I first saw SkyDrive as its capacity (25G) and features seemed actually useful - just what I need to keep a shared drive between a bunch of distributed computers. But mystifyingly, Microsoft do not offer any way to simply map it to a drive letter. You'll have to log on through a web browser and either do traditional file-upload type operations or install some ActiveX junk just to let you do "drag and drop" (which I don't want to do anyway - I want to script stuff from the command line).

Given how obvious mapping to a drive letter is as a feature, and how trivial one must assume it would be for Microsoft to implement, I can only assume they've deliberately crippled it for strategic reasons.

Assuming it's not just a delusional fantasy I hope GDrive gets this right, because this is a service I do want ...

Back in the day (mid 90s), you could actually mount ftp.microsoft.com on your desktop, e.g.

    c:\> net use m: \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub

That would have been a security nightmare tho' (SMB over the Internet, WTF) and they stopped it, so I'm guessing they still haven't quite figured it out.

I suspect the real discriminator in that is the inability to serve adds to an SMB share.

"What business model, again?"

Google wants data. The more data Google has the more money it makes. That's how their business scales (so far).

When there isn't a way to get the information they create the market, e.g., Android. When there is, they use that, e.g., OpenSocial.

Getting people to upload their whole hard drive to Google would be a huge deal for the company.

Until Google gets significantly better at handling accidental account suspensions, the idea of using this (whenever it arrives) is just too scary for me.

I've never heard of 'accidental account suspensions' except for AdSense, which is because it actually costs them money. The only reason it's considered accidental is because it cannot be directly linked to the person owning the account, however all the youtube accounts that get closed are never accidental it's cause someone committed copyright infringement.

"bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop."

AUGH