Tag: google drive

Earlier today, Google announced that it would add Google+ profile pictures, one-click chat, and anonymous animals into Drive. In the continued effort to utilize Google+ across its entire platform of cloud software, when you now open up a file in Drive, you will see the Google+ profile pictures of other viewers at the top of the document. Hovering over them pulls up their social network information; Google says this will make it easier to make continued collaborative efforts on documents across networks. Further facilitating this ease of use, Google is making it easier to start group chats in Drive. You can now simply select the new chat button at the top right of the page and start chatting away. In the case of an anonymous user, Google is assigning random animal names to the unknown users. 

Google’s newly-labeled Drive has replaced documents, and is one of the main components of the opt-in Google product suite. Before today, the power to collaborate with this software, to incorporate it into new apps and document-sharing situations, has rested in the hands of Google developers exclusively. But today Google posted Drive Realtime API that lets third-party apps integrate simultaneous collaboration with Drive within their products.  So keep your eyes open for further Drive integration with third-party platforms; cloud-based document storage and sharing is here to stay.