While Google has positioned its new Google Drive cloud-storage service as one that straddles the consumer and business space, those using it for collaboration will probably get the most out of it.
Google launched Google Drive on Tuesday, promising, according to Google's blog post, the ability to collaborate, to store your stuff in the cloud, and to search it. That's entirely on point. Drive does do a bit more than that, but those additional capabilities are rudimentary at best.
One, however, stands out: Google's ability to scan a photo, and either "read" it using optical character recognition, or identify it using its own technology. On the other hand, Google also claims Drive allows videos to be uploaded. I had issues, and found that part of the service hit or miss.
I've tried a few cloud services over time, but never quite found what I, as a consumer, was looking for: the ability to store gigabytes of multimedia and other files in the cloud, plus the service's ability to stream that multimedia to my phone, on demand. All for free, of course. Perhaps with a pony as well.
For cheapskates or freebirds like me, you'll be better off turning to (or remaining with) Microsoft's SkyDrive, which offers 7GB of free storage; Google Drive offers five. (SugarSync, which I've also used, does as well.) Microsoft also gave existing SkyDrive users 25GB of free storage. Google, however, would like you to pay them for the privilege of mining your files: 25GB for $2.49 per month, 100GB for $4.99 per month, or even 1TB for $49.99 per month. However, you won't see any ads attached to Drive, anywhere, unlike Gmail.
For those familiar with Google's services, you'll be happy to know that Google fits within the ecosystem relatively smoothly. "Drive" appears in the black navigation bar at the top of the screen. You'll most likely think that you've wandered into Google Docs by mistake, because, essentially, Drive is Google Docs, at least to begin with; your initial list of files stored within the Drive framework will be the spreadsheets and documents you've already used.
To access Drive from the desktop, you must download a small installer, which creates a small running service under Windows or your Macintosh. When the installation completes, Drive will appear as a folder. If you add files to it, an icon will appear as they sync to the cloud.
I tried a number of different items: folders, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, JPEG image files, MP3s, PDFs, an AMR audio file, an image resizing application (.EXE), and MPEG, .WMV, and .AVI files. Previously, when I imported a Word file into Google Docs, Google would save it in a .GDoc format. Not so with Drive; Word files remain as Word files. However, documents, spreadsheets and presentations in the Google Docs format do not count against your storage limit, according to a Google spokeswoman.
And remember, there's also Google Play Music, a separate cloud service for your music files, along with rivals like MSpot. My only issues arose with video files. I tried an .AVI file of my son at Halloween; no dice. A .WMV file of some Lenovo ThinkPad promotion? Nope. With MPEG, I couldn't upload a 70s street scene, but a video of Weezer's "Gone Fishing" floating around my hard drive uploaded with no problem. (I have no idea where I got that from.) Granted, there are almost dozens of different video formats available; I've asked Google for a list, which I hope they'll provide soon.
One of Drive's strengths is collaboration: it allows you to basically share any file you'd like, and attach comments to it as well. I confess that I felt a little awkward commenting back and forth within Drive (as opposed to, say, Twitter or Facebook) but, clearly, this is a legacy feature from Google Docs. And in that case, collaborating on a project, presentation or documents feels much more natural.
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