socialrosiechen: Google turns on public links for Docs, or: 1GB of free, high-speed cloud storage

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Google turns on public links for Docs, or: 1GB of free, high-speed cloud storage

Update: it seems your mileage may vary. MP3s work -- M4A files get renamed to MP3. The built-in virus scanner doesn't work with some file types -- and results in 0-byte downloads. OGG also works! (Is this the same system that will manage the Android/Chrome OS music-in-the-cloud service...?)

Update 2: MP4 and OGV work...

BOOM!

In one fell swoop, Google just made publicly-accessible cloud storage very, very easy. Before now you could either share documents privately, or provide access with an obfuscated URL -- now you can make your Google Docs visible and accessible to everyone.

This means we're all sitting on top of 1GB of very fast and very easy-to-use cloud storage. In theory Google Docs are meant to be documents -- spreadsheets, presentations, etc. -- but... you can just upload an MP3, an AVI... and make it public!

Seriously -- go try it out for yourself. Just click upload in the top left corner of Google Docs. Select any file and click start upload. Then, click through to your new upload, click share in the top left corner, 'Get the link to share...' and finally 'Allow anyone with the link to view'.

Have fun while it lasts -- it will probably be fixed in a matter of hours or days. I don't think non-document file types are meant to be uploadable...