Google’s Cloud Picker: Still Not GDrive?

Google Cloud Picker is an upcoming Google feature, accidentally revealed by confused users on various Google product forums who had trouble getting it to work with their Google Apps accounts. Later, TechCrunch happened upon the postings, and published details for all to see, prompting a public statement from Google which essentially said “oops.” Nope, we weren’t meant to see this yet.

So what is Cloud Picker? Apparently, it’s a storage product that ties together several of Google’s services – YouTube, Docs, Maps and Picasa photos – to allow for easy insertion of media into other Google services like Blogger and Google Sites. Wait, a Google storage product? Isn’t that Gdrive?

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Gdrive, the long-rumored Google competitor to Microsoft’s now 3+ years-old SkyDrive cloud storage service has never officially been revealed. But it was supposedly going to do something similar – tie together Google services into one interface.

Isn’t that what Cloud Picker is doing?

Actually, no – at least not to the extent of what Gdrive would have done. Cloud Picker only appears as a pop-up when you go to insert media into Blogger or Sites at this time, according to the forum posts.

In other words, it’s a dialog box, not a service.

And frankly, it’s not all that different from Microsoft’s “Quick Add” functionality, which let you add Maps, Images, Videos or other online media into Windows Live Hotmail. The only difference is that Quick Add content came from Live Search (now Bing) while Cloud Picker pulls from your own files, as opposed to those publicly hosted on Google.com. (Quick Add functionality is no longer just a sidebar – “Insert” buttons in Hotmail serve the same purpose now. There are buttons for inserting Office Docs from Office Web Apps, photos from Bing, etc. When clicked, the sidebar appears.)

Even though Cloud Picker isn’t a standalone service, wouldn’t it be nice if it were? As a regular Google Docs user, I’ve personally longed for a single interface that would allow me to manage, edit and share all my Google-hosted files from speadsheets to YouTube videos. Cloud Picker definitely isn’t it, but it’s a step closer.

As some commenters have already pointed out, integrating Cloud Picker into Google Chrome or Chrome OS would help transition users more fully to the cloud. That would be a good thing, of course, but we’re stilling hoping for a Gdrive launch one day, nonetheless.

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