Don't Hold Your Breath For GDrive

By Jason Lee Miller - Mon, 08/20/2007 - 1:00pm.

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.

News Tags: Google, Platypus, Indexing, GDrive

About the author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Comments

Submitted by sylvie chen (WPN reader) on Tue, 08/21/2007 - 1:45pm.

Gdrive indexing fears

Ok, GDrive gives me insurance that my data is not lost. Fine.

So does the IRS every year I file. Fine.

The distinction here is that the IRS "owns" my data even though I created it.

Google does not "own" my data but it is committed to make access to it as easy as possible through indexing for global/local search. That means they need to know everything. Not fine.

Until someone figures out that the only way to store data in a third party vault is to encrypt it without their help, businesses and savvy computer users should stay away from "Gdrive" solutions.

PAge and Brin's mantra of 'Do no evil' is laudable but if you know everything about someone, there will always be individuals that will use that knowledge to their advantage, Google notwithstanding.