More Gdrive chatter – sounds like wishful thinking…

As happens once every few months, the Gdrive rumor mill began to churn again today. This time a blogger at Search Engine Land (SEL) declared “It’s Alive”, based largely on a pretty vague comment made by Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson in an interview with CNET.

The SEL blog indicated that this might mean trouble for paid subscription sites (they mention Box and ElephantDrive, both of which we’ve included in our directory.

Our take? This is a pretty big leap. The comment Jackson made could simply mean tighter integration with Google Docs and a larger file size limit. Either way, Google is scaling back its new product development so it is unclear how these goals fit into their product road map. Based partly on the research that suggests that users aren’t fully comfortable with the ad-supported services for their personal files, we think this could produce a very interesting delineation.

New storage demands drive online adoption…

Anthony Calypso reports that massive accumulation of valuable digital assets is turning consumers on to online storage. He cites Jonathan Steuer, a vice president and general manager for Iconoculture Inc., a Minneapolis-based cultural trend research company who says “consumers are having data storage issues that they’ve never had before … more of their assets are digital (i.e. photo content, MP3 files). As people accumulate more stuff, there is a notion of wanting to protect those [items]. It’s really part of the Web 2.0 world that we’ve seen building for a long time.”

Calypso notes that “Consumers might have an easier time breaking bad habits once they become aware of the online back-up options available today,” and recommends ElephantDrive, Mozy, and Xdrive as solutions.