UnixPoet

sort of. A sign in page comes up but even after giving it my (correct) password it just takes me back to the sign in page.

Interesting post by Jonathan Schwartz (COO of Sun):

“The two features every single user needs are: Save, and Open. So wouldn’t it be interesting if rather than exploring your local file system on your local PC, the Save and Open panels simply looked to a network account on Sun’s Grid? Shareable like any of the mainstream photo services are today? Or how about saving to that 2.5Gb allowance Google gave you in your GMail account? And wouldn’t it be great if you could save to ODF, or translate to Microsoft Word, or generate a podcast or mp3 file - on the fly? From within any app?”

The game plan as I see it: you save your document to base.google.com which kindly hosts it for you for free. Google will most certainly index it - for two reasons: for search purposes but also to learn more about you. A nice addition to the just hosting the document would be a Writerly style offering which allows you to edit the documents you upload. The aim is not to supplant Word, which is hard to do anyway, but to extend it a little. I don’t think Google actually aims to kill Office; they just want to peek at the files you create using it.

And then? Then they sell you even more targeted advertising.

Google already give out freebies to developers who write plugins Google Desktop Search. I wonder if they should offer similar incentives to developers who extend their applications to save to base.google.com.