Is the Google Drive Going to Become a Reality?

You may have heard of it and not even realize it.  It’s been called Google Drive, GDrive, “My Stuff,” Platypus, and many other names.  These are all names for Google’s mysterious online storage service that has been rumored to be in development since at least 2005. Blogs keep on predicting its “impending” launch – heck, even the Wall Street Journal has gotten in on the act. Still, GDrive is nowhere to be found.  It’s kind of like Chinese Democracy all over again, except that the Guns N’ Roses CD (if you can call it that) DID actually happen.

Although, you can might be able to find it if you work at Google, where it is said to be used internally (or if you visit this page made for April Fools Day).  The real deal, however, is non-existent. That isn’t putting a halt to speculation about it, though.

New evidence for what may be the mythical Google Drive appears in the recently launched version of Picasa for the Mac. The photo software made by Google seemingly gives the user the option to move photo collections to something known as the “Google Web Drive,” as a MacRumors forums member first found. The Google-focused blog Google Blogoscoped did some more digging and found a website that previously sent users to a “www10″ service (again, seemingly the Google Drive) now returns a 404 page error, but its DNS entry has recently been updated with the CNAME entry “webdrive-client.1.google.com” (hmmmm).  This masically implies that Google is at least playing around with some sort of “webdrive.”

Google also apparently owns the domain names googlewebdrive.com and gdrive.com. The latter was found way back in 2005 when it was also revealed that Google owned the domain name gbrowser.com. That may have seemed odd right up until Google released its own web browser, Chrome, a few months ago.

And finally, Gmail’s product manager Todd Jackson had something interesting to say to CNET’s Josh Lowensohn last week:

“We know people’s file sizes are getting bigger. They want to share their files, keep them in the cloud, and not worry about which computer they’re on. Google wants to be solving these problems.”

While the interview was about Gmail, that’s not stopping some from using it as evidence of the bigger picture – that Google will eventually want to launch their Google Drive. It does make sense.  After all, arguably Google’s biggest rival, Microsoft, has a cloud file storage service with Windows Live SkyDrive (what a name!). So if Google really wants to solve the online storage problems, it should probably have such a service too.

AOL recently closed its Xdrive online file service to cut costs, and perhaps that’s why Google has delayed launching Google drive. But if I were a betting man, I’d still bet on Google Drive coming at some point in the near future. There are too many hints and broken links out there that point to it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Google working on an official GDrive for cloud storage?
• The Best Online Storage Service – Windows SkyDrive