A few months back we were exposed to the Google GDrive online page and now it looks like Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped actually got his hands on the client application that Google employees use. The current codename is Platypus as you can see in the lovely screenshots but Philipp, who couldn’t login with his Google Account, was quick to note that:
Gdrive, from what it looks like, is not a product for general release, but a way for Google employees to store and share files.
He has also placed a copy of the HTML help pages on his site that are available for both Windows and Linux users. There are two interesting points in those files:
Can I help make Platypus better? I have some 20% time built up.
Yup! We’d love your help with engineering, interface design, or marketing. Email Justin if you’d like to volunteer your time. You can also make Platypus better just by using it and reporting bugs.
What data should I keep in my Platypus share?
We encourage you to keep all of your files with us, including your Office documents, photos, and personal notes, except for sensitive data (including electronic protected health information) and other files inconsistent with the internal user agreement.
So they are obviously trying to gear the service to hosting all kinds of files for people but they make it sound like there is no team dedicated to working only on this project. They want people to use some of their “20% time” that Google employees receive to work on any project that they would like. That essentially means that they have one day out of each week to make the next big Google app…and hopefully GDrive will be it!
Philipp then went on to post the configuration file and that appears to limit users to 500MB of storage, or they may just be using that configuration file for testing purposes and want the ability to try different limitation sizes. The thing that is really funny, and you knew there had to be something, was what I noticed in the configuration file. If you take a look at the URL for a forgotten password it points to here. Guess that is something they still need to implement. 
The last bit of news that Philipp shared was an image that showed a listing of all the files that the application contained:
It is a little disappointing to think that Google isn’t going all out trying to release the GDrive that we have all been craving. Maybe Google leaked this on purpose though! They could have done it to throw competitors off and make them think that Google hasn’t really done much work on their file backup/storage software? Hey, I’m trying to be optimistic here!
It’s good to keep hoping that Google are going to release this – you wonder whether they’re reacting to the hype by leaking this, just to tide people over.
Still, until the day when they announce something I’m not going to count on any online backup service.
I would say this is a beta for employees that might get relased tot he public soon. It makes no sense to have x amount of gmail storage, x amount of web page storage, x amount of storage for docs and spreadsheets. Google is about being succinct and organized, and it’s current state isn’t very organized.
I would put this in 6 months time: time to get the storage set, organized,and to have “service associations” with each files uploaded (i.e. a word document attached to an email received in gmail is accesible in docs & spreadsheets, but not from the google page creator”.
It would be more efficient to say to a person “you have x amoutn of space to use for email and storage, you can blog it, edit it, post it, share it, and do whatever you want with it” than to say” you have 2 gigs for email, 250 MB for web space, 50 MB for docs and spreadsheets, and whatever space we give you for another service.
I would like to see this storage integrated into google talk so I can share files from anywhere with anyone. It bugs the crap out of me how long it takes to upload a file directly to someone so they can just downlaod it. If there was a centrailzed server with my file and I can just say “here’s a ticket, get the file” that would be awesome.
This is a piece of software that I would love to have and use. This will be one of those “killer” apps.
I hope to see it come out as soon as possible.
I agree. I use Mozy for the time being to store some of my files but Google is really what I’m holding out for.
That kind of Google Talk integration would be absolutely awesome! There are so many things that they need to integrate together but it will probably take them quite a bit of time to do it.
Google have better make this good as they are really going to shot themselves in the foot otherwise being so late to the market with this type of service.
Well the google people said they were making better integration of existing programs instead of making more programs.
I noticed that Google tends to “leak” new product info on Fridays. I think this is just a managed leak to get the buzz out about the product. I’ve been waiting for this. It’d be great to have my info in the cloud (secured of course).
Dax
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