Google is working on offering people free online storage space, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Some little details need to be ironed out, but the launch of the service called My Stuff is imminent, the paper reports.
My Stuff will be partially free of charge. If you want more than the standard offer (not exactly clear how much this is or how it is allocated), you’ll have to pay up. The Wall Street Journal reports that the storage space can be used for any kind of data.
Google’s ‘My Stuff’ needs some more calibrating before it is problem free. Some critics have publicly voiced concerns about privacy issues as well as intellectual property rights. The exchange of data might lead to violations of author rights, the critics contend.
Another issue that has raised concern is that Google forces users to its own domain. Users need to be online before they have access to their data. Google Gears, the Google tool for offline access to data, has been developed to solve this issue.
Last but not least of the technical hiccups is Google’s own capacity to store data. Only recently news reports circulated about the search engine’s lack of internal servers’ storage capacity following the huge demand by users of its Gmail service.
After logging in, users should be able to access the data which they can store not only from pcs, but also from smartphones. Plus there’s going to be a facility to share with others.
At the moment, you can store a limited amount of data on Google through Picasa, the photo website, which offers 1GB of free space. Picasa users who want more storage space, can expand their capacity to 400GB against a fee.
Google also offers people free space through Gmail. This spam resistant email offers up to 5GB of free storage space, which features the nifty Gmail-drive – a back up drive. The Wall Street Journal signals increased competition for storage space. Microsoft is testing a product called Windows Live SkyDrive, which offers users 1GB free storage space. Yahoo’s Briefcase also offers some free space.