Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud services that lets you store, sync, and share files over the Internet. Google Docs is one of the most popular cloud services that lets you create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations on the Internet. For years, people have thought that these are two good services that would work great together. Now, it looks like Dropbox may be giving us this functionality.
During the first annual Dropbox Hack Week, a happy developer was able to set up a way to “sync files between your Google Docs and your Dropbox.” There’s no word on when this feature will show up in Dropbox, but “many of the breakthroughs made during the past week will probably be making their way to a Dropbox near you.”
Since this is a feature that users have been asking for, I suspect we’ll see it sooner than later.
Before that though, it seems that we’ll see Dropbox Rewind. This will let you “hop to your Dropbox at any point in the past.” For its users, this could be the perfect defense against deleting files by accident and never remembering to make backups. Now, if only the university researcher who says her stolen laptop contained years worth of data related to a possible cure for prostate cancer.could have used this, she still wouldn’t, at last report, be so desperate to get her MacBook back.
Dropbox users can also expect to see file system usage analytics. Of this forthcoming feature, Dropbox management only wrote, “We have to stay a little quiet on this one, but let’s just say the future of Dropbox will change the way you sync files.” At a guess, I’d say this is a system that will automatically sync files that are frequently accessed.
Personally, I want to see all these features. I use Dropbox and Google Docs all the time. I use Dropbox because it’s free and it will let me access up to 2GBs worth of my current work files no matter whether I’m on one of my Linux laptops or desktops; a Windows PC, my MacBook Pro, my Droid 2 smartphone, or my Apple iPad.
I’m fond of Google Docs for similar reasons. While I don’t tend to create many documents with it, I do tend to edit and share them with co-workers on Google Docs. Now, if Dropbox makes it easy for me to say share a document from one of my Dropbox directories to one of my friends on Google Docs even though the only “PC” I have at hand is my smartphone or tablet, I’ll be one happy guy. And, I know I won’t be the only happy Dropbox user doing this.
