Ioannus de Verani

OK, I got you with the title, but read on anyway. But, seriously, anybody have one? ‘Cause I would love one!

More and more evidence is coming out to support the existance of a real, Google Drive. First there was when Greg Linden found a site for GDrive on Google’s servers, which was taken down soon after:

Then there were the intercepted powerpoint slides that talked about the Google Drive:

Store 100% of User Data

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including:
emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible
from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS,
Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints
today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state
but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for
storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important
(thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis
Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your
data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves
more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we
can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own
machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of
a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be
access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has
more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse
(as access list), etc.

Then, there was the post on the Google Blog that was quickly taken down this morning:

We Will Drive You Crazy

Posted by Niniane Wang, Google Drive Team

Here
at Google, we’re always looking for new ways to improve technology.
Sometimes, this means thinking a few steps ahead of what the
competition has to offer at the time. When we released Gmail on April
Fool’s day, 2004, some of you weren’t too sure whether to believe us or
not: an email client that came with 1 GB of storage.

Today perhaps, you won’t believe us again. Instead of 1 GB, you’ll get 50 GB — of completely free storage. Google Drive
is Google’s latest effort to organize the world’s information and make
it universally accessible to you — the user. Now you can store your
vacation photos, your home videos, your text documents, ZIP and EXE
files, and anything else really… and access your data from anywhere.
And if you do believe us, please sign up for the private Beta invitation today and learn.

Perhaps what happened was that Niniane posted it, thinking that she was authorized to, and then she took it down when she realised her mistake. Or maybe they are teasing us, by putting things up, and taking them down.

The last straw was the new blog in the Google Family, the Official Google Drive Blog. Here was posted the following (a pic, in case they take it down):

Aghhh… It looks real, but DO WE KNOW?

So, what would the GDrive look like? Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped thinks it might look something like this mockup:

(click to see bigger!)

A while ago, Philipp actually got ahold of the GDrive client:

So, when are they actually going to tell us what it is????? I want it!

References:

• Google Blogoscoped
• Googling Google
• TechCrunch
• Maybe some others