I logged into my Google Documents account earlier this week and discovered that Google is about to put the kibash on the offering and change it to Google Drive. It is currently in beta so now is a good time to scope it out and see what will change. Thought I’d give you a few thoughts of my own.
From their overview page about the new offering we read:
Google Drive is a storage platform that allows users to access their data from any device or application. Users rely on Drive to store all of their data, while third-party applications rely on Drive to enable rich and contextual features for this data.
They also state that you can store anything. Hmm… We’ll see how that goes. Also directly from their page, “Users can open any type of file from within Google Drive.” That will be a feat.
What is cool is that applications from on our computers or mobile devices (yea, mobile!) can be given access to the drive. This is very useful for us busy folks.
Integration is currently available for PC, Mac, Android, and iOS. (No Blackberry at this time, sorry!)
If you make the switch, and honestly you’ll have to at some time in the future if you are using Google Documents, you’ll initially be given 5 Gig to store your stuff with. However, there are paid offerings as well with varying degrees of storage space. And the price is very, very reasonable.
We’ll see if it works out to actually open “any type of document”, and more importantly whether it will work on all browsers to offer all the same features as those programs. (It is my opinion that they won’t be as robust, though being able to open them at all and make some modification is huge.) I did discover that some of the Excel features at least did not work at all in Firefox. Granted I was trying it on an older version of Firefox, but obviously Google wants you to use their browser, Chrome.
Because things will be accessible for mobile devices it should impact your mobile marketing efforts for good.
If you discover something and want to share, please let us know what you find.
Your Mobile Marketing Team,
Mobile Site Army