14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors about speculated Google products are hardly new or rare and seem to be a favorite pastime for some. Still some of these reports, even the most far-fetched ones, do turn out to be true sometimes, as is the case of Google's upcoming operating system Chrome OS. Another popular rumored product is the now mythical 'GDrive', which is billed as the company's general purpose cloud storage service. And new signs are popping up hinting at an approaching release.
A cloud storage service would be a no-brainer for Google, which already offers similar functionality in several services. Picasa offers 1 GB of storage for photos and videos and Gmail boasts a storage space of 7.5 GB and counting, allowing users to save every email and attachment they ever received. YouTube offers practically unlimited storage and Google Apps 1 GB. Google Docs also allows users to upload documents and even photos so a service that would enable users to upload any kind of files wouldn't be too much of a stretch for Google.
The search giant began an overhaul of its Docs product last week and started with some small changes ahead of an expected major release coming in “the next few weeks.” And now the Google Operating System blog has noticed that one of the small changes could mean a lot more than it would look like at first sight. Google Docs currently supports four types of files – Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations and PDFs; however, the recent update changed the PDF label to the generic 'Files' one. While still only allowing certain types of files to be uploaded the new label hints at a change in policy coming sometime in the future, perhaps as soon the next big release announced last week.
But there is even more evidence that all of Google's products that offer cloud storage may be merging at some point with Picasa integration expected to come to Google Docs and with a few new discoveries further solidifying the claim. Two new icons were discovered in the Docs code – one, a folder icon with the Chrome logo, most likely part of the upcoming OS, which will depend heavily on cloud apps and storage, and the other with the YouTube logo hinting at some kind of integration of that service too.
With Widows SkyDrive proving a solid product that offers 25 GB of free online storage it is only a matter of time before Google will release something similar and the fact that it is taking so long may indicate that it is waiting to have a unified experience across all Google services before releasing the product.
