Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped received and attempted to install a leaked copy of the GDrive client being used by Google employees. He was unable to login after installing (our belief is it must be used from an approved IP address) it but posted some interesting information.

Platypus syncs an online copy of selected files with a downloaded local version. Users can share by individual or project and can provide view or edit permission for individual users. GDrive shows up as a separate drive icon on users’ computers and can be accessed via a static URL. Internal users by default get a mere 500 MB of storage each. Philipp posted the Platypus Help file for Windows and Linux as well.

There’s no evidence that the program is set for public launch any time soon, but hints supporting such speculation have been popping up now and again for some time. Here’s a quick timeline of previous TechCrunch coverage of the illusive GDrive product:

1. In March Google held an analyst day that included documentation of a future offering called Google Drive, emphasizing security, cross application, platform and device access. The information was quickly taken offline but Michael Arrington wrote a summary of “what we know” about Google Drive to date.
2. In an April post about Microsoft’s forthcoming Live Drive, Michael Arrington wrote the following. “From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously).”
3. In July Corsin Camichel discovered a brief description of GDrive on the newly acquired Writely servers, which was quickly mirrored before Google took it down. Not a whole lot of details but it was seen as some level of confirmation of the project’s existence.
4. If we needed any proof that Platypus at least exists, today’s leak might be it. Some people say (Paul Graham for example) that the best way to predict what Google will develop well for commercial release is to watch what they use internally.

A lot has changed since we wrote our overview of online storage in January. Watch for the release of ZohoDrive soon as well.

Does this leak mean anything in particular? It’s hard to know, but there’s at least some information available to chew on. In all likelihood GDrive is only a matter of time.

One note on the leak: As we pointed out in a post earlier this week about the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets product, Google is going to focus on convincing small and medium sized businesses that their internal Office documents will be secure on Google’s servers. Google needs to control its own leaks if they hope to do this – this is the second major Platypus leak this year.

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.

We have all the ingredients for a great story: dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors.

Here’s what we know so far:

Epic 2015 – Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives

In the spring of 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson presented the ominous Epic 2014 (now renamed Epic 2015) that ultimately predicts that Google will force the New York Times to shut down. In the movie, they also predict that Google will launch something called “Google Grid”: “…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.” See the movie here.

Google Drive Discussion with Analysts

Robin and Matt’s Google Grid prediction seems to be well on its way to becoming reality. On March 2, 2006 (a few days ago), Google hosted an analyst day and presented a wide range of information on new products and strategies. Among the information was a description of the upcoming “Google Drive”, a place for users to store 100% of their data online.

On page 19 of the presentation, Google stated the following:

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.

These slides were also made publicly available.

Greg Linden Discovers Google Drive; Google Purges Information

However, the slides discussing Google Drive were quickly taken down by Google and replaced with a sterilized version after entrepreneur and blogger Greg Linden noted the Google Drive information and blogged about it.

Greg did not retain a copy of the original, but readers of his blog did and posted the original content in the comments to Greg’s post.

What we Know

At this point, all we know is that Google is already developing Google Drive, an online storage service that will be designed to store all of our data and make it accessible from various devices. No word on pricing. As to timing, Google is concerned with storage and bandwidth constraints that exist today, and so this may still be far into the future.

Even so, the thought of Google entereing the market must give the online storage startup gang a shudder.

A final thought on Google Drive: Information was clearly purged from analyst materials (unless this is an elaborate hoax by Greg and his readers), meaning we have selective disclosure of this information. Some people received it but it is not generally available to the public. I don’t like this. In fact, I think it’s Gevil. Now that some people know about it, Google should put it (back) up on the web.