Google is on quite the ride, and with the company's wealth of engineering talent, capital and a rapidly-expanding technology infrastructure, the sky seems to be the limit for what's by far the world's most successful, most popular search engine. Beyond this, the company has been adding new Web services to its portfolio, including GMail and Blogger, and software services including Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, and most significantly, Google Desktop, which for those running Windows, lets users index their computer files and search them all with the same ease as they can the Web today. With the latest iteration of Google Desktop, the company introduced a new feature enabling customers to search their files from multiple computers, with the data being stored on site at Google. While this has raised privacy fears in some crowds, it may soon be accepted practice, as most technology advancements are after time has passed.Now it's clear that Google isn't done there. In a presentation shown at the company's recent analyst day, some of the slides made reference to a service to "GDrive", which aims to store all the world's files - whether they be "emails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc." The optimistic hope is that Google's GDrive would eventually grow to be the master drive, with local drives acting as cache or backup, not the other way around. While the idea is similar to Apple's iDisk and a variety of online services, Google may be aiming to take it to another level. Initial reaction has been mixed, whether it's labeled as the "wild fantasies of engineers with too much caffeine" or instead making yet another vault of data for unscrupulous feds to access should privacy rights be further deteriorated. Time will tell, as Google has not yet announced GDrive publicly , and it may be months before we know the truth.
Related Links:
Wall Street Journal: Google Has Plan to Act as Hard Drive for Users' Files
Geeking With Greg: In a World With Infinite Storage, Bandwidth and CPU Power