Google Docs To Host Any File Type

ezabi writes "According to a post on the official Google blog, in the coming weeks Google Docs will offer to host all file types with a limit of 250 MB, which as they say is larger than the current limit for email attachments. This will have its consequences: paid file sharing will die, more shared pirated material, newer vulnerabilities and malware distribution channels..."

Comments

Microsoft has something similar

[PCM2]

Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.

Re:Microsoft has something similar

[PCM2]

As the AC below said, files can be up to 50MB each (for now... I see no reason why Microsoft wouldn't up it to compete with Google).

It will work on Linux. It works fine with Firefox, and it even works on Chrome (even though Chrome is not officially supported). I think pretty much any standards-compliant browser should work (though I seem to remember I might have had a problem or two with Konqueror, even though Safari is one of the officially-supported browsers). IE users get a fancier upload tool via ActiveX, but that seems to be about it.

At present, it's sort of a "trial" in the sense that everything is pretty much still in beta. But Microsoft's stated intent is for everything to be ad-supported. I think the idea is to get initial revenue from ad sales, then hook customers into Microsoft's commercial desktop software.

On the downside, I didn't think the SkyDrive UI was all that impressive. Google Docs changes things up by presenting files as a chronological series based on what you've accessed most recently, kind of like an email inbox. SkyDrive tries to simulate the files-and-folders desktop paradigm, but it's really just for show. You don't have any of the flexibility of being able to drag and drop files, for example. It's a lot of clicking and waiting for page refreshes.

The UI for the Office Web Apps really is very slick, though, and they also seem to work fine with any modern, standards-compliant browser. (And that means not with IE6 -- it's not supported.)

Re:Will these be all public too?

[noidentity]

Paid file sharing dying would be a good thing, people shouldn't have to pay to share what is theirs.

They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?

Re:What?

[PCM2]

250mb is pretty paltry by their standards

It's not 250MB total storage space. It's 250MB maximum per file. It's probably true that most e-mail clients/servers do a poor job of handling 250MB attachments. In that sense, this is probably a good thing; we've all complained about the coworker who sends out a 15MB movie of their kids playing with the dog to a mailing list, but what option do most average users have? Even if they know what FTP is, they don't own any servers. If Google is going to handhold consumers through the process of storing big files in the Web instead of sending them as attachments, I say bravo.

Pricing info

[FleaPlus]

It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr, almost an order of magnitude more expensive.

Pity uploading via browser still sucks.

[AaronLawrence]

Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?

Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468

Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...