Google announced yesterday on its Google Drive Google+ page (yes, that’s a lot of Google in one sentence) that it’ll be rolling out a new “Share” feature in Drive over the next few days.
Here’s the gist of how the feature works. If you’re in the local Google Drive folder on your Mac or PC, you can right-click a file or folder and then hover over the “Google Drive” sub-menu. From there, click “Share” and I presume that you are given a screen that allows you to edit sharing options for that particular file or folder.
I say “presume” because, to the right, you’ll see what I currently have access to when I try to use the feature. It’s likely a small glitch related to the roll-out of the new feature, so I’ll have to try again later and see if anything has changed.
The addition of this share feature for Google Drive blurs the line a bit more between local storage and cloud storage by enabling users to share files and folders much like they would over a network. Of course, these files have to be stored on Google Drive, and sharing is done through Google accounts instead of over a LAN, but the user won’t have to open a website to make it happen.
When you take that into account, and also factor in Google’s sudden interest in building HTML-based apps that can work just fine without an Internet connection, you start to see Google backing off if its Internet-only, browser-based future a little bit. Perhaps there is a place for the traditional desktop experience in the company’s plans, after all.
What do you think of this new feature — is it something you’ll use on a regular basis? Let us know in the comments.