Showing that its Web application priorities extend to the mobile world, Google on Wednesday demonstrated a version of Gmail for the iPhone that could be used even when the phone had no network connection.

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, showed off at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona what he called a "technical concept" of Gmail even when the iPhone was offline. In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail for desktops and laptops, and like it, the mobile phone incarnation runs in a Web browser, not as a native application.

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network. To watch a demonstration, check the demo video on iPhone Buzz.

Offline applications can't of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, e-mail is stored in a local database on the phone, even when online.

"You'll note that it's very, very fast because it's using that local database," Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his in-box.

It's significant for several reasons that Google is eyeing a new version of its Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone. For one thing, the company wants to bring to the iPhone all of Gmail's features--search, labels, and conversations, for example--and Apple's built-in mail application lacks those abilities. But more broadly, the move is significant because it shows how Web-based applications can bypass the control that particular companies such as Apple or Microsoft have over a computing technology.

HTC's newest Android-powered phone, the Magic.

(Credit: Crave UK)

Apple has achieved tremendous success with its App Store, which lets people download and buy software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it controls that conduit, and it only can deliver software written specifically for those devices. Web applications run in a Web browser, and all smart phones have browsers--though, of course, hardware and network constraints typically mean they're anemic compared with desktop versions.

In case the point about the power of Web applications was lost on observers, Gundotra showed the same Gmail software running on the HTC Magic, a new phone using Google's Android operating system.

"You now have an ability to build an app that spans devices as long as that device implements the latest specifications of these modern HTML 5 Web browsers," Gundotra said.

The mobile phone version of the Gmail software uses a somewhat different approach to enable offline access.

Where the desktop version uses a Google-developed open-source browser plug-in called Gears to enable offline support, the iPhone version uses the offline data storage standard of HTML 5, the gradually emerging overhaul of the language used to describe Web pages. That technology can cache the state of an application as well as data such as messages.

Of course, getting a modern, full-featured browser on a PC with plenty of memory is hard enough, and mobile browsers generally lag PC versions. However, it should be noted that Safari on the iPhone, like the browser in Android, is based on the WebKit open-source project, and WebKit has been building in offline support. So at least on some higher-end phones, a Web-based version of offline Gmail could be an option sooner rather than later.

One of my beefs with Gmail, a service I otherwise like, is its propensity to create duplicate contact entries for the same person without any action on my part.

I'm not sure if this is part of its internal workings for identifying contacts, an issue synchronizing with iPhones and Exchange, or something else, but it's annoying. On more than one occasion I've had to recombine my own entry back down into one contact, and I've had to do the same with my wife's entry, my parents' entries, and others.

Of course, there are legitimate occasions when Gmail might have multiple entries for the same person, such as when a friend whose personal e-mail address you use then e-mails you from her work address.

Google now offers to treat the symptom, if not the disease. There's a new "Merge these 2 contacts..." link that appears when you select multiple contacts. Clicking on it presents a unified entry that you can save, modify, or cancel as you see fit.

Remember Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, with Dr. Larry Brilliant at its helm (I just love mentioning that name) and a hefty 1 billion to spend? Their latest initiative is called Google PowerMeter, a service that will let you track electricity usage in your house.

Of course, what you’re probably wondering now is how the hell does Google know how much electricity I spend, and when did I sign up for that? The trick is: it doesn’t. The software will rely on“smart” electrical meters which will be able to report the data back to Google, so you can have a convenient PowerMeter gadget on your iGoogle homepage.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports:

The Google Hot Keywords blog widget [link to Google’s page] can show you what is in fashion now, and what other people are interested in.

It’s appealing that you can view buzzwords from the previous day or the previous week. I am sometimes surprised to see that such words are so popular! Personally, I like the “fortune-teller” feature from the previous week’s ranking. When I click on a keyword, I am quickly taken to Google’s result page and so I enjoy the feature.

I might not have noticed them by myself, but now I understand that these things are what people care about.

I am participating in CyberBuzz’s campaign.

Asiajin says, “CyberBuzz is one of the biggest pay-per-post agencies in Japan and are known for their high payouts,” with some posts getting “$100 for a single entry.” Asiajin explains “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ’ad’ tags ... [at the bottom], which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers,” adding “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” TechCrunch comments, “It’s interesting to see that Google, a company that not too long ago radically took action against PayPerPost bloggers in the US [see Google’s Matt Cutts’ post], today thinks the concept is suitable as long as it helps them advance in Japan”.

By now, Google Japan issued an apology. Asiajin translated the post:

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

Mobile devices...and replaces anything already there.
Last year, Google rolled out a way for BlackBerry users to sync Gmail and Google Calendar contacts to their devices, but today Google a

The new beta of Google Sync can put Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events on iPhones and Windows Mobile devices...and replaces anything already there.

Last year, Google rolled out a way for BlackBerry users to sync Gmail and Google Calendar contacts to their devices, but today Google announced it is rolling out a beta of Google Sync for iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. The application enables users to push their Gmail contacts and Google Calendar items directly to their mobile devices. For iPhones, Windows Mobile devices, and phones that support SyncML (like most Symbian S60 devices and many Sony Ericsson phones), the synchronization is two-way, meaning updates to made either on Google's services or the phone are automatically matched up "within minutes." Google Sync's connection is always on, so updates are automatic regardless of users' locations or activities.

Google envisions Google Sync being most useful for folks who use Google Apps and other Google tools regularly, like business and schools tied in with Google Apps, or families who rely on Gmail and Google Calendar. The synchronization process is all-or-nothing: syncing via Google Sync will replace all existing contact and calendar information in the mobile device, so users should be sure they want to use the service before getting started. There are also known issues for both theiPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

Gmail has added an interesting feature you can opt-in to by choosing Settings -> Labs -> Multiple Inboxes -> Enable -> Save Changes. Once Gmail restarted, you will find the main view split into several panes; the normal inbox, but also your drafts, or starred messages to its right. (Good for big screens, bad if you’re suffering clutterphobia.) You can configure the individual views by switching to Settings -> “Multiple inboxes” and entering Gmail search queries. For instance, I’ve entered is:unread to result in a pane which shows all my unread messages.

[Thanks Arie via the Gmail blog, with hat tip to Ionut’s

The release of Google Earth 5 has further whetted the Googlebot's voracious appetite for new data.

Specifically, Google wants more views of the planet for the newhistorical imagery feature in Google Earth 5, which lets people see earlier views of a particular area, not just the present. The company established an Imagery Partner Program through which organizations can supply their data.

Don't expect to be paid for helping Google out, though. "We are happy to add your map content to Google's services at no cost to you, but we generally do not pay for content," the company said on its image partnership frequently-asked-questions page.

In fairness, Google offers some situations where sharing the data would be in the interest of a municipality, for example, that wants to be on the map but is tired of waiting forGeoEye-1's satellite camera to whiz overhead. There probably also are organizations with public-domain imagery that would like to see it made broadly accessible but that aren't trying to build some business out of it.

Plus, Google has a point that processing lots of geographic data is laborious. Who wants to orthorectify and georeference a bunch of data sets? Quoting some of Google's reasons for why people might want to share:

• Make a positive impact on your community and the world

• Simplify navigation and geographic analysis
• Raise awareness of land use and environmental issues
• Facilitate emergency management

• Boost tourism and foster economic development

• Enable visitors and tourism agencies to plan and present travel itineraries
• Support business site location planning

Google announced the new partnership program on its Lat Long blog Thursday.

Mapping is getting more important in the digital world as new possibilities open up for navigation and finding nearby friends. Google has aggressively pursued this area with online maps and satellite views, and the company has begun testing advertisements in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Yahoo doesn't share quite the degree of obsession as Google, but it's working hard on geography too. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it has 100 million geotagged photos on Flickr, its image-sharing site.Geotagged photos have map coordinates built in, letting people find photos of a particular region or explore their own archive geographically.

Accepting others' data could help Google accelerate its geographic agenda, though. And who knows, maybe they can get somebody in Clarkesville, Md., to help fix weird purple arcs that show up in Street

As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google's online tools a bit more competitive for business users.

The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.

The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.

Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google's Offline Calendar FAQ page.

As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person's computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.

"Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon," according to the FAQ.

Google’s Chrome browser has this neat little feature built-in that lets you browse the web in porn incognito mode, which essentially means it will refrain from storing any information when you visit web pages. According to this help page explaining the feature, you can switch to browsing incognito if you want to “plan surprises like gifts or birthdays” in stealth mode.

Except you won’t be able to do that using Facebook, and not because it falsely claims it’s a phishing site this time. It won’t even let you open and edit files using Google’s own Docs

If you try to open Google Docs or Facebook with the latest version of Google Chrome (update 1.0.154.46), you’ll see a notice that the browser isn’t supported yet. Facebook will even admit that they’re probably not cool enough to support the browser, pointing to alternative browsers like Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and Flock instead. This only happens in incognito mode, so this seems to be a mildly amusing oversight on Google’s end.

Granted, adoption for Google Chrome can’t be deemed phenomenal so far (still lacking a Mac compatible version doesn’t help) and the browser is still in beta, but they still might want to take a look at why this isn’t working, considering they’re creating incompatibility issues between two proprietary products and with Facebook still growing remarkably fast around the world and all that.

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Human error caused a glitch that returned the message "this site may harm your computer" for all Google search results for about an hour Saturday morning, the company said.

Google works with a nonprofit organization that runs the site StopBadware.org to obtain a list of URLs that are known to install malicious software if users go to those sites. StopBadware researches complaints regarding sites and decides which URLs should be on the warning list, so "since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms," according to an official Google blog post Saturday morning credited to Marissa Mayer, the company's vice president of Search Products & User Experience. Minimizing the Risk of Information Security Breaches: Best Practices for SOA Governance and Compliance: View now Google "periodically" gets updates to the URL warning list and got such an update for release on its site Saturday morning.

"Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," she wrote. "Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file." Mayer apologized in her post to anyone who was inconvenienced by the glitch and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled as being malicious.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," she wrote.may be harmful to your computer."

Google went a little crazy yesterday and started tagging every search result as malware. Later Marissa Mayer explained what really went wrong and how a human error affected the entire search results.

So that’s that.. but it does not end there. Apparently one of the signalsGmail spam filter is depended on is the Malware information from Google search. The Gmail blogsuggested its users to look into the spam folder to see if they find any legitimate mails in there. This might have happened because of the error in malware filters.

Google will also do its bit by automatically restoring these e-mails back into the inbox in the next 24 hours.

Last year, Google launched Ad Planner as a way to help media buyers plan their advertising campaigns. Now, they've updated their traffic models to improve planning.

Here are the updates:

• Added Unique Visitors (cookies), a new cookie-based metric, to help you cross-check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics.
• Changed Unique Visitors to Unique Visitors (users) so it's clearer that you're reviewing estimated numbers of real world visitors.
• Placed the Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site's profile page so users will have a more comprehensive view of how a specific site can support their media planning.
• Added country demographics for Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Switzerland, which brings the demographics total to ten countries
• Created Pre-defined Audiences that represent commonly used audiences. Uers can experiment with various criteria without having to manually select them.

By its very nature, communications infrastructure is general. It can be used to plan both legal and illegal activities, and it’s generally impossible to tell which is which. Last year, a US army intelligence report worried that terrorists could plan their attacks using Twitter, and there are unconfirmed reports that the Mumbai terrorists read the Twitter feeds about their attacks to get real-time information they could use. British intelligence is worried that terrorists might use voice over IP services such as Skype to communicate. Terrorists may train on Second Life and World of Warcraft. We already know they use websites to spread their message and possibly even to recruit.

Next time you're dealing with a dreadfully slow internet connection, you can ask Google what's causing the trouble. The company announced a new open platform Wednesday called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab for short. As part of the initial launch, M-Lab includes three publicly accessible tools, including a tool called Glasnost that tests whether BitTorrent traffic is being blocked, throttled or otherwise impeded on your broadband connection. Also part of M-Lab's launch are a tool to test your connection's overall speed and a diagnostic tool that will tell you if you're suffering from speed barriers common to last-mile broadband-network infrastructures.


In a post on Google's official blog, the company's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf says M-Lab was launched to help the academic community. Researchers at institutions like Georgia Tech and Germany's Max Planck Institute have been working on these projects, but they've been hampered by infrastructure problems.

"Unfortunately, researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," he writes. "This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another."

To provide a suitable testing environment, Google will roll out 36 servers over the course of 2009. Also, all data collected by the project will be made publicly available for anyone to cite or reuse. In addition to the three tools launching Wednesday, there are two more currently listed as "coming soon" on M-Lab's site. The first is called DiffProbe, and it's described as network probe that will determine if your ISP is shuffling certain kinds of traffic onto a slower pipe. The other tool still in development is Nano, which will tell you if your ISP is purposely throttling traffic from a particular group of customers, traffic from specific applications or traffic bound for specific destinations.

It's interesting to see Google stepping up into the role of a proactive net-neutrality watchdog. As a company that's banking on the internet eventually being put to use by all of us for everything above the operating system level — applications, data storage and communications — the move makes sense. But rather than push for open, reliable connections in the courts or through legislation, Google is taking the fight to the streets.

For years, ISPs have been notoriously shady about what they're throttling or blocking. The industry needs a healthy dose of transparency. Right now, we're just a bunch of pissed-off users complaining about our Skype calls getting dropped and our YouTube videos sputtering to a halt. But when it comes to placing blame, most of us are in the dark.

Google and the academic institutions its partnered with are empowering users to find out for themselves who's to blame when their service turns lousy, and helping them figure out where to direct their anger. And not just the command line jockeys, but everyone — tools like Glasnost are aimed at novices, the only requirement being a current version of Java.

With access to the data that tools like this can provide, we'll be able to suss out the culprits and force them to own up to the true nature of their traffic-shaping policies.

2008 was a great year for Google, search’s presiding monopolist. The company engulfed share like some search market phagocyte, an algorithmic blob with no Steve McQueen in sight to stop it.

According to comScore’s 2008 Digital Year In Review report, Google began the year claiming 58.5 percent of all search queries and ended it with 63.5 percent. Moreover, of the 137 billion search queries conducted in the states last year, 85 billion were handled by Google (GOOG). That means Google claimed nearly 90 percent of the total growth in search query volume for the year.

Astonishing, yeah? Frightening as well, given the potential antitrust implications of such growth, which shows no signs of abatement. After all, Google’s mindshare is growing faster than its search market share. ComScore ranked the company as the top U.S. Internet property for 2008. The U.S. Internet population grew four percent in 2008 to 190.7 million visitors in December.

Google Sites (Google.com, YouTube.com and Blogger.com) grew 12 percent to 149 million visitors.

You do the math on that one…

Google's new Measurement Lab aims to let Internet users test their Internet connections...and determine if their ISPs are placing limits on their activity. With Comcast being sanctioned by the FCC for terminating P2P sessions and Cos just announcing it will soon be capping bandwidth utilization for anything it deems non-time-sensitive, many Internet users have been wondering if there's any way to determine if their ISPs are monkeying around traffic behind their backs…presumably in the name of "reasonable network management." But determining what an ISP is or isn't letting through at any given moment is tough work, beyond the reach of most everyday Internet users.


Now Google is aiming to shed some light on ISPs bandwidth management practices with its new Measurement Lab, and open platform that will enable researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. Championed by none other than Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and so-called "Father of the Internet" (and in partnership with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the PlatnetLab Consortium), M-Lab will start off with 36 servers in 12 distributed locations in the U.S. and Europe, and enable researchers to collect performance data. Google intends M-Lab to be a community-driven effort, and promises all data will be available for other researchers to build on.

Initially, M-Lab is running three tools that are intended to help users diagnose common problems and determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled back by ISPs. Google anticipates additional tools will be running on M-Lab from other researchers and community members—two more network diagnostic tools are slated to come online soon.


"At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation," wrote Cerf in the Google corporate blog. "No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy."

Vancouver is now available in photorealistic 3D. It's a beautiful city in Google Earth now as well as in real life. I looked around quite a bit for other new 3D cities, but couldn't find any other new ones. There are some expanded coverages in other cities. For example, New York City is now extended north a bit covering Harlem all the way up to the Bronx. Also, I have reports of Portland and Seattle being a bit more expansive. While looking for new coverage I was looking at Los Angeles.

The amount of coverage from downtown LA to the coast and north up to the foothills is amazing. Thousands of buildings! But, I those areas were part of the last update. Read GEB's last 3D cities post which lists all the known major 3D cities in Google Earth - except for the new one: Vancouver.

In recent days, an application designed for Google's mobile operating system "Android" was accused of wiping data from user's phones. It's not known whether or not the rumors are true, but once again questions are being raised about the safety and security of Google's open platform versus more controlled and regulated platforms like that of Apple's iPhone.

For supporters of the iPhone, a story about a rogue Android application proves their point that Apple's oversight and review process is necessary for keeping consumers safe. However, the real story behind the accusations may have nothing to do with the "open vs. closed" debate at all, but more to do with how an unliked application (and its developer) were slammed and then taken down by the Android community. Was MemoryUp a "Rogue" Application? Whether or not MemoryUp actually destroyed personal data and spammed people's contacts, as it was said to have done, is unknown.

However, it would have been difficult for it to have accomplished those things. The app required no special privileges to install, so it's hard to imagine how it could have accessed the data and email addresses or how it could have sent out the spam. Also, for what it's worth, the company behind the app adamantly denies the claims. Says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio, "We are very disturbed by these reports. Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product." ...Or a Victim of Community Backlash? The truth about this application may be that it just wasn't very good, not that it was dangerous malware.

Many comments about the app in the Android store (prior to the app's removal) and in the forums weren't about losing data but about how the app wasn't worth installing because it provided no real value to the user. What's even more apparent, though, in reading through the posts and comments about MemoryUp, is that many members of the Android community seemed to have a grudge against the app's creator, Peter Liu, whose drive-by advertising in forum postings got under people's skin. "How many times are you going to advertise this on here?" wrote one user. Later, others bragged and joked about running the "Memory folks out of town." "Peter needs to get a life," said yet another user. It stands to reason that a handful of Android community members decided to disparage the application to get back at the app's developer...but something like that could never be proven, only suspected. Yet, if that was the case, those people inadvertently ended up hurting Android in the process. By raising questions about the safety and security of Android platform, they helped to spread "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about this new mobile OS.

Even worse, these rumors make the iPhone's closed and "by approval only" model look like the safer, smarter choice when it comes to phones. But as anyone involved in the open movement will tell you, that is not necessarily the case.

The promise of cloud computing is a good one — all your gadgets can be used to access all your information, all the time. Your iPhone can call up just the same files and music as your desktop machine at home. You can go on the road with a laptop and just pull down your data from the internet. And that same data, your precious data, is secure, backed up in the ether and resistant to both disaster and your own negligence alike.

The reality is far from this. There’s so much talk of “living in the cloud” that you could be forgiven for thinking it a workable solution. But there are a few big problems related to both your own hardware and the hardware of the network. Let’s take a look.

The main problem is ubiquity. By definition, your most important files are the ones you need with you at all times, or at least at any time. But what if the internet connection is down? How do you get the spreadsheet from Google docs, or refer to the map in that email when you are offline? The standard scenario is that you have your connection chopped of when you’re on a plane, although I actually like the relaxing offline time of a plane ride. This is a problem, but in truth you are cut off whenever you are away from home or office.

What about 3G modems? Well, they work for small data, but the networks are still too slow for shifting big files like music, photos or movies and when you get outside the Big City and its 3G coverage, you may as well be on dial-up. And war-driving for Wi-Fi is no way for the professional to work.

So, say we solved the network problem. You have a netbook with a day-long battery life and a guaranteed, 24/7 connection that’s fast enough to stream HD video. We’ll dream a little here and pretend that it is also cheap and has no crazy bandwidth caps. Would this work? Maybe, but I think most people still like to have their data with them, where they can “touch” it. The cloud is nice as a backup, but if it’s the only copy of your data, it’s a little worrying not to have your own local one.
Enter Google’s GDrive, which is being rumored for launch soon. The idea seems to be that you upload all of your data to Google’s servers and then use that instead of a hard-drive. This seems stupid. More likely is that you mirror your computer’s drive at Google and then changes are seamlessly copied across your various devices and the web as you make them. This keeps every gadget up to date but also means you can grab files while in an internet cafe without your own machine.

Sounds dumb? There are already services that do this. I have my MacBook Pro and my hackintosh partially synced via DropBox, and I can also get those files on my iPod Touch via the internet. the problem is that I only get 2GB free, and if I pay, I can still only get 50GB. Remember how, before Gmail, you counted webmail storage space in the megabytes?
I have a feeling GDrive will do the same for web storage. All your info, everywhere, all the time. Think of it as IMAP for everything. It’ll happen, and when it does, our portable gadgets will become truly useful