In all of the discussions that come up around Google's missing long-rumored G-Drive, no one ever mentions Panoramio.
Google's storage strategy has always been confusing - at this point we have free about 6GB on Gmail, 1GB on Picasa, 200MB on Google Page Creator, as well as some storage on Google Docs (I can't remember how much off the top of my head). The product that never seems to get mentioned, though, is Panoramio - a location-based photo sharing site that Google owns now for around a year (purchased June 1 '07) and has integrated into Google Maps and Google Earth heavily (you can view geo-tagged photos from Panoramio on both of those products). I was surprised to find that Panoramio allows for 2GB of storage, more than Picasa, Google's main photo sharing site. One of the few things that keeps me from using Picasa more often is that lack of storage, and I would certainly be happy with the extra gig or two.
More importantly, there is still the main question of how come we can't share the nearly 10GB of storage Google is offering in its many products as we see fit? And how come we can't see all of our files across all of Google's owned and operated properties in one "storage" location? AOL and Microsoft both have products that offer 5GB of free storage of any sort - I am not sure exactly how integrated the storage is into the rest of their products, but it doesn't matter much - I don't really use them. With Google, I have some content spread across almost everything they operate, and I'd like to keep track of it, share it, manage it, and appropriate it easily and as I see fit.
