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Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

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Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#371

Post by karpathy »

Few of my observations from this announcement:

In Google's vision of the future, your computer is a thin client. There is no My Documents folder, as everything personal lives on gdrive. The Chrome app store becomes the new operating system. Apps will have access to your files, they will be able to search them, open them, and operate on them. You will never see the "Open file" dialog box again.

In this world, the concept of a file on your local computer in some folder does not exist. Your stuff is simply available to you from the cloud from whatever computer. The abstraction or concept of a "file" or "folder" will fade. Our children will not know what these words mean. They will see their pictures in a web interface with location and time overlayed, completely oblivious to the fact that it happens to be stored as a .jpg file somewhere on google servers and an associated .txt file that contains some meta data about it.

We are finally moving beyond (arbitrary) abstractions from mid 1900's. I like this future.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#372

Post by robryan »

EvilTerran wrote: post #360
patrickk wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Linux support ... Headless (command line interface) Most normal (non-techie) users aren't going to care about these though. I can see the OCR being a big win among college students...scan in all your handwritten notes, and boom! they're all indexed and searchable and won't get lost before you need them for your final exam.

OCR doesn't mean handwriting recognition, though... handwriting's a heck of a lot harder than print.

Google are probably best placed to pull it off though with recaptcha.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#373

Post by Zaim3 »

NZ_Matt wrote: post #226
vibrunazo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any of the cloud competitors already offer a similar api that would let my app users use their infra instead of mine? Or associate my app into their ui? Or is this a novel from google?

Windows 8 and Skydrive has a similar concept built into it called contracts. Developers can integrate their app to work with Windows 8's UI. For example you can search your Flikr or Facebook directly in the OS in the same way that you search the file system. Here's a video demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesj1I_wsqI#t=12m00s http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsappdev/archive/2012/03/23/act...

Win8 contracts seem very similar to Android's "Intent" functionality.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#374

Post by juliano_q »

bad_user wrote: post #249

I was already paying $20 / year for 80 GB of storage that I was using for backing up my photos on Picasa. Unfortunately the new plans are way more expensive, especially since my photo collection is growing like crazy and I'll end up needing much more than that. If there's one thing I hate about Google is that you cannot rely on their pricing. They did the same thing with App Engine. I'm also using the free version of…

You know that this price will remain the same for the old users, right?

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#375

Post by tagx »

vibrunazo wrote: post #118
primigenus wrote: post #35

Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it): "Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can d…

Does any of the cloud competitors already offer a similar api that would let my app users use their infra instead of mine? Or associate my app into their ui? Or is this a novel from google?

We currently do that with http://filepicker.io/ across multiple cloud providers (only Dropbox and Facebook for now though)

We currently only support opening and saving back files but we plan to add save-as support in the next few days

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#377

Post by ramanujan »

primigenus wrote: post #35

Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it): "Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can d…

For anyone wondering when this will come out for Apps:

  A Google Apps version of Google Drive will arrive for 
  Google Apps admins on the rapid-release track "over the 
  next few weeks," Google said; it'll also include 5GB free 
  but monthly prices beyond that will be somewhat more 
  expensive, for example $4 a month for 20GB or $89 per 
  month for 1TB.)

  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57419024-93/google-drive-its-slick-integrated...and-not-exactly-free/
When GDrive for Apps launches, it will enable a new sort of workflow, where a user can open specified file types in GDrive with internal webapps behind a VPN. If combined with the existing Google Docs API, this could be the start of a whole new class of business process apps. Interesting.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#378

Post by tomkarlo »

EvilTerran wrote: post #360
patrickk wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Linux support ... Headless (command line interface) Most normal (non-techie) users aren't going to care about these though. I can see the OCR being a big win among college students...scan in all your handwritten notes, and boom! they're all indexed and searchable and won't get lost before you need them for your final exam.

OCR doesn't mean handwriting recognition, though... handwriting's a heck of a lot harder than print.

Actually, Evernote's OCR does handwriting, and at least for me, does it pretty well. It's not going to give you a transcription, but it's good enough that the doc will show up if you're searching for it.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#379

Post by felixfurtak »

primigenus wrote: post #35

Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it): "Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can d…

'...send faxes' - how quaint!

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#380

Post by mappu »

aresant wrote: post #68

I recently upgraded to Dropbox @ $199/yr for 100gb to archive our digital photos. Yesterday MSFT skydrive offered 100gb for $50/yr. Today GOOG offers 400GB for $100/yr or 1TB for $256/yr. As a consumer with "offsite backup" in mind, there doesn't seem to be an inherently high switching cost to move services away from DropBox. As a result I think that they're going to need to reassess pricing strategy within the year.…

There are lots of other options you can compare price with - the obvious one being cheap VPSes: BuyVM (happy user) offer 250G for $7.50/mo ($90/yr) or 1TB for $29.95/mo ($360/yr), with the advantage being that this gets you your own IP address and you can run whatever you like on the machine (web server, sftp server, rtorrent, ...).

It's not a complete solution for the non-technical, and not vertically integrated like GDrive, but you could probably compete with Microsoft and Google in your spare time with a little margin by reselling them pre-configured: There's ftpfs for linux and no end of ftp apps for whatever phone you've got.

I am a huge fan of using cheap VPSes for everything.

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