Over the next couple of weeks – and it hasn’t happened to me yet – Google Docs will allow you to upload any file to its free gigabyte of cloud based storage.
That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’s a great feature for the already great Google suite. Google Docs is an excellent way to share and collaborate with documents over the web, but until now the type of file you could upload to Docs was limited to document files. You couldn’t share EXE files, for example, and you couldn’t email them either – with the new feature you’ll be able to upload any file, and share it with whoever you want.
Suddenly, Google Docs looks a lot cooler. Some might complain that 1gig is not a lot of storage – Microsoft Live SkyDrive offers 25Gigs – but there is no other company that offers the same range of complementary products, and more importantly it’s where the users are. I think 1gig is fine to be going on with, as is the 250mb files size limit. When uploading files now to Google Docs, it’s much smoother and faster than other sharing sites I’ve tried, like the dreaded Rapidshare. Dropbox is nice, but it needs installation. With Google, everything stays in your browser.
So, I think this is a great development. It’s not the G-drive that had been talked about, but it’ll really help online collaborative work, and sharing between friends too.
