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July 10, 2006

GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Another hint at a coming online storage service from Google has been discovered by bloggers and quickly taken down. Corsin Camichel took the smart if logical step of adding index.html to the end of Google’s Writely.com URL and found a page allegedly detailing a Google storage service, codenamed Platypus. Since being blogged about, the page is offline (the link is to a mirror). Since the entire story is based solely on this one screen shot, this is little more than a highly speculative rumor at this point.

We wrote about GDrive in March when information about the product was released by Google in an analyst presentation. Nothing seems to have come of it yet. There are any number of Google services under development and many bloggers complain (myself included) once they are released that they fail to meet expectations. Why then all the hype today over a single page on another domain about possible service features? Apparently Vista uses perpetual delay announcements to secure mindshare pre-launch and Google gets to reap the benefits from playing whack-a-mole with bloggers eager to chase after any whiff of a service that could launch some day. Wake me up when there is reason to believe that launch is coming.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 9:24 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. /pd

    July 10th, 2006 at 9:53 am

    ” one screen shot is getting all over the blogosphere seems unwarranted to me.”

    then why did you write about it ??

  2. Haochi

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:08 am

    There’s a mirror page you can checkout, if you think “one screen shot … is unwarrant to” you.

  3. Anonymous

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:13 am

    Well, you’ve just added to the fire and vaulted it up to the top spot over at Techmeme.

  4. Slava

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:14 am

    Haha… I can’t believe you wrote all that with a straight face.

    “the play this one screen shot is getting all over the blogosphere seems unwarranted to me.”

    “bloggers eager to chase after any whiff of a service that could launch some day”

    That’s you Marshal… you are that blogger who chases after every whiff of a service. You’re doing it right now. Why the high horse?

  5. Michael Arrington

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    Chill out everyone.

    This is news, even if its unlikely to be accurate. People often want to know about the most recent rumors. What’s important is that Marshall didn’t state this as fact, just an unlikely rumor.

  6. Jay

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    I agree with Michael, this blog isn’t all about the release - it’s about what’s about to be released too.

  7. m3mnoch

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:41 am

    yeah. you people are tards. blogs are about opinion and news and rumors and information. that’s why they are cooler than stuff like usa today. that’s why we’re all here, reading this post. as long as he didn’t state it as fact, why do you care?

    oh, i forgot. /pd, slava and some chickenshit own the ‘bloggosphere’ and it’s reputation. wait, no. they don’t.

    ya damned, predictable ‘anti-establishment is cool’ bandwagoners anyway.

    m3mnoch.

  8. /pd

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    Mike

    this post was edited to remove the words “getting all over the blogosphere seems unwarranted to me.” Correct ??

    So, now it observisely appears that “What’s important is that Marshall didn’t state this as fact, just an unlikely rumor. ”

    >

    Whatever happened to the unbiased opinion that was “unwarranted” ??

    So when did Techcrunch Bloggers, begin to edit without transprancy and jus to suit their fancy ??

    No, Mike -please dont get me wrong. I have a high degree of respect for techcrunch/yourself .. however, what I saw posted here today and what I am noticing here as edit is self conflicting– in terms of ‘fariness’ !!

  9. Slava

    July 10th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    Oh please, m3m… I’m all for reporting rumors and I love reading them. But when you report on a rumor and in the same breath declare that it’s “unwarranted” that other people are reporting the same rumor, well, that’s a tad ridiculous. (although it seems Marshal just changed his wording on that, unless I’m blind and can’t find it)

  10. Michael Arrington

    July 10th, 2006 at 11:35 am

    Marshall was away and I made an edit to his post (without talking to him about it because he’s out for a bit, otherwise I’m sure he would have done it). No conspiracy. I’d say 80% of posts have substantial edits to them after the post. Often, someone finds an error and I correct it, etc.

  11. /pd

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:05 pm

    Ok Mike - roger that. No problem. Fair enough. Thats whats friend are for .. correct the “boo boos” :)-

  12. /pd

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    and just to clarify the “highly speculative rumor at this point” - its note worthy to read this too :)-

    “I bought a condo, got two kitties (Oreo and Kit), got a roomate Huy, became a techlead of project Platypus at Google, and met a crazy girl with multiple personalities named Cybil”

    http://daveey.netapt.com/weblog/

  13. Michael Arrington

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

    yeah, I read something else too that makes this look like the real deal.

  14. Mitch

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    The real deal as in it exists or the real deal as in it’s going to launch anytime soon?

  15. Splasho

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    I think its much more transparent if deletions are marked with strike-throughs on blogs. That way /pd wouldn’t be made to look foolish when the text he quoted no longer appears.

    “someone finds an error and I correct it” - this wasn’t really a factual error, just hypocrisy.

  16. Drew Olanoff

    July 10th, 2006 at 1:01 pm

    I smell a very calculated leak from Google. I don’t blame them, gDrive is probably not done, but why wait to get the featureset out there until Microsoft (or someone else)launches their own solution? Smart on their part.

  17. Michael Arrington

    July 10th, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    Splasho - that’s ok, I’m sure you’ll get over it.

  18. Splasho

    July 10th, 2006 at 1:08 pm

    Indeed I shall.

    Drew, personally I doubt it. It would be odd to place an index.html file on the server of a recently acquired tool, without linking to it, simply to let out the existence of a service. It was pure chance that Corsin came across it (if we believe his story, which I do).

    Note that there is lots of discussion here: http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/44044.html .

  19. Bad Day?

    July 10th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Michael, what happened to that thick skin you say you’ve developed in response to critical comments?

    Remain professional, your blog depends on it.

  20. Michael Arrington

    July 10th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Marshall is my thick skin.

  21. Ben

    July 10th, 2006 at 3:51 pm

    OK, from a quick look at comments in the source code:

    @author Justin Rosenstein (jr@google.com)

    Who would appear from http://www.roadlesstraveled.org/justin/ to be a Product Manager.

    And what’s with “http://troutboard.com/p” (given as a location to view files, but seems to redirect to 127.0.0.1)?

    Whois gives:
    Patrick Chan of Ridgecrest, CA 93555 or fishingfiend_95@hotmail.com

    Who may be the Java programmer of the same name.

    The blog which originally found this page doesn’t seem to have any other stories on it, although is that due to the site going static to minimise the Digg/Slashdot effect?

    Anyway, there’s some obvious things to check out before complaining that the “blogosphere” is giving the topic some “unwarranted” attention. You could at least check the story’s internal consistency, and see what the Google staff have to say (even a “no comment” vs an outright denial tells you something).

  22. DrumsNWhistles

    July 10th, 2006 at 5:38 pm

    So…do you think that Google will be as cavalier with data as they are with mail? How would it feel to discover that you didn’t have access to everything you stored on that GDrive despite having pretty strong security.

    I have to say that after today’s nightmare roundabout with Google and their Gmail non-support, there is absolutely NO WAY I would possibly trust them with the contents of my hard drive. Hell will freeze over first. I don’t care how well they could search it.

  23. Richie

    July 10th, 2006 at 5:47 pm

    Only hope it will come as soon as possible.

  24. Bob

    July 10th, 2006 at 6:02 pm

    Wow, that screen shot was about as clear as all the photos we’ve been shown of the Loch Ness Monster. So why is that image “so” bad.

  25. adam

    July 10th, 2006 at 7:29 pm

    I am trolling for an invite into writely. I lost my login info and now I can only get in if I am invited to edit a file. help a brother out.

  26. samsonsu

    July 11th, 2006 at 1:22 am

    i can’t wait to see this happen. microsoft just bought foldershare.com company and branded their great service under live.com. guess gdrive will be somehow similar.

    some differences as far as i can tell. gdrive seems to give you some actual web storage while foldershare doesn’t. foldershare is only a remote sync tool. their website only store file timestamps but relies on your workstation(s) being online in order to get files synch’ed. i think it is good enough. if gdrive provides web storage for everyone, i’ll start worrying about how much they can provide for each user…

    anyway, let’s just wait and see…

  27. Nik Cubrilovic

    July 11th, 2006 at 1:52 am

    Platypus is what Google uses internally to store data - not the references to internal apps. It has been known for a while now that Google has an internal online storage system that they would like to launch to the public, but had some obstacles in releasing it.

    What I think has happen here is somebody at Writely saved the platypus main page to the server (as indicated by broken image links etc.) for some reason (one reason could be to use it as a template for a new Writely login screen) and somebody just happen to find it.

    I dont think finding the frontpage of platypus changes much in terms of Google’s timing on launching a service - and I don’t think it has anything to do with Writely.

    The person who found it should have grabbed the HTTP headers so we would know more about the page.

    Another interesting thing - Writely is already running on GWS (Google Web Server), and it is setting the *.google.com cookie, meaning that it looks close to being finished (doubt the backend is still ASP.NET unless they are running Mono on GWS which is unlikely) and ready for release.

  28. Philipp Lenssen

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:25 am

    Nik you make some excellent arguments. I integrated this here:
    http://blog.outer-court.com/ar.....1-n52.html

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