We have been hearing rumors about the Google Drive online storage service for years now. This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud. Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is. Yesterday, Google Sites, a service that lets users build their own websites without ever having to touch the HTML or CSS code, just launched an update to its unified ‘insert’ dialog. This dialog brings together all of your files from almost all of Google’s services and looks a lot like we would imagine the GDrive to look like.
Even more interesting, as Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System blog point out, is that you can use this link to access the ‘document picker’ used in Google Sites directly – though most of the items in it are meant to be inserted somewhere else and don’t open in the standalone dialog (yet?). Internally, according to Chitu, Google calls this service OnePick, though we weren’t able to find any other references to this so far.
What makes this dialog interesting is that this is likely the first time Google has brought all of these services together and also made it easy to search for documents across all of these services. Of course, in the context of Google Sites, it makes perfect sense to see all of these assets in one dialog, but until now you couldn’t directly access Picasa’s albums from Google Sites, for example.
We can’t be sure if this is really a harbinger of the Google Drive, but hopefully Google will bring this interface to other services like Gmail or even Google Wave.
