While Google is buzzing about its coming GDrive cloud storage service, Microsoft is continuing to add more features to its competitor, SkyDrive.
- Support for Open Document Formats (.odt, .odp, .ods)
- Share to Twitter
- 300MB file uploads in the browser
- Short URLs (sdrv.ms) for Windows Phone images shared to Twitter
Many of these features were rumored to be coming to SkyDrive for the past couple of months, as LiveSide.Net reported back in February 2012.
Microsoft is moving toward combining its Skydrive and Live Mesh services with the next release of Skydrive. (Live Mesh is Microsoft’s Dropbox-like sync service that the company first announced in 2008.) Up until now, SkyDrive has been little more than a Web site where users can save, share and access files and data. The SkyDrive team plans to turn it into more of a real service that will supplement Windows 8, according to a February 20 post on the Building Windows 8 blog.
Microsoft has been stepping up the pace at which it is adding new features to some of its Live properties, like Hotmail and SkyDrive, as of late. But it hasn't been as quick to add interim updates to the set of Windows Live services known as Live Essentials -- which are software plus service add-ons for Windows.
Update: Meanwhile, for those of you who aren't toolbar haters, Microsoft also has a new version of the Bing Bar it is rolling out today. Version 7.1 includes new Facebook chat, Slacker Radio and search suggestion functionality.