GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers

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.