Don’t Hold Your Breath For GDrive

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:00:04 +0000

From purely a connotative language standpoint, "indexing the world’s information" sounds less ominous than the goal of caching "100% of user data." Even so, the long-rumored GDrive may never surface to store all of it.

Codename Platypus may never see the light of day, says Philipp Lenssen, as a mysterious video that showed up on YouTube shows…well, it did show, until it was marked as private.

Philipp writes:

Just in case you missed the latest rumors revolving around the YouTube video “Googley Blues”: The video, apparently created and sung by a Google employee, was showing the Gdrive aka Platypus icon overlaid with the lyrics, “I’ve been ready to launch my product since 2002 … At least round here 5 years ain’t so long overdue.” Someone claiming to be an ex-Googler – I can’t verify this – now adds in the comments, “Platypus was intended for public release as much as [a] year ago, but then there was the push away from creating new products."

It wasn’t too long ago that a PowerPoint presentation leaked that mentioned GDrive and used the phrase "Store 100% of User Data," referring to a goal of offering access to everything a user could want from any platform or device.

That PowerPoint presentation met is no longer available either.

GDrive Spotted Again

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:56:16 +0000

The inadvertently revealed storage service from Google known as GDrive has been leaked online, under the code name “Platypus.”

Another Friday, another Google rumor “leaked” to a blogger. This one isn’t quite as big as the YouTube to Google story that was covered in two or three thousand other sites and blogs.

Instead, as ZDNet’s Google blogger Garett Rogers described it, the rumored GDrive storage service from Google that got him blogging in the first place has been sighted online:

The Windows client for Gdrive, or Platypus as it is known internally, has been leaked to Google blogger Philipp Lenssen. He is unable to get past the login screen with his username or password, but now we have physical proof of the product that first got me blogging about Google and was accidentally mentioned in a PowerPoint presentation made by Eric Schmidt.

The screenshots displayed on Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped site show a smiling platypus icon (minus the venomous ankle spurs the male platypus has, so maybe Google’s icon is a lady.)

This Platypus, according to Lenssen, is not what the public may eventually see from a GDrive debut:

I’ve been able to get hold of Google’s internal Gdrive client, named “Platypus”* (information on the project leaked a while ago). Please 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.

Google’s Platypus help, which I’ve mirrored here in its Windows and Linux version, says:

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.

Lenssen could not get past the login screen, so more detail beyond the screenshots he has posted is not available yet. That leaves us with two issues to consider:

1) Will Google users trust the company enough to make extensive use of their storage service and place sensitive information in GDrive?

2) Will Google continue to leak product information to bloggers on Fridays (assuming they have done so by design to date)? It has to be cheaper than paying Ogilvy to do PR, right?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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Don’t Hold Your Breath For GDrive

GDrive Spotted Again