You can already store your photos on Picasa Web Albums (though the amount of free storage is very limited). However, once you pay Google, your Gmail storage and Picasa storage limits become one - so Google clearly has at least some unified infrastructure for doing some of the back-end work in place already. According to a document (PDF) unearthed by Google is Watching You, that is exactly what Google is planning to do with the GDrive.

Google has enough clout to take online storage mainstream. While this directly benefits Google, it will also benefit the cloud storage industry in general, as the big name behind the product will drive up the general comfort level with online storage.

There are, of course, numerous small and medium sized-companies that offer online storage in some form or another. The smartest ones integrate directly with your desktop, so that you can seamlessly move data between the cloud and your own machine. A large number of other services also offer backup services, though without directly integrating this with your desktop. While all of these offerings are interesting, none have really made it into the mainstream yet.

What the GDrive is Up Against

Google's biggest competitor in this business is most likely going to be Microsoft, which has just started its push for cloud computing and storage. With its Live Drive, Microsoft offers 25GB of storage to all of its millions of Windows Live users. But Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if it didn't also offer ten different online storage solutions that can't speak to each other. You can also use LiveSync to transfer data between your own computers, Live Mesh for syncing and online storage, and Office Live Workspace for managing and storing office documents. And these are just Microsoft's consumer products in this space.

If Google gets the GDrive right, it will be able to offer one single online storage solution that does all of what Microsoft's plethora of tools does, but through one unified user interface and service. If the descriptions of the GDrive that have surfaced over the last week turn out to be true, then Google wants to offer a solution for all your files, including documents, photos, and (interestingly) music.

If Google can also offer solutions to access these files on mobile phones (besides Android) and if it offers a good integration with the desktop, then it could surely become the company that takes cloud storage into the mainstream.

Now we just have to wait for the actual release of the GDrive...

Mac users can now sign in to Live Mesh, go to 'Add Device,' and click the "limited Mac Tech Preview now available link." However, it looks like Microsoft is only releasing this as a limited beta so far and will only allow a limited (and unspecified) number of Mac clients to connect to Live Mesh at first.

Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 users in the US and the UK can now also download a Live Mesh client (US residents, UK residents).

Other Updates

Overall, most of the updates to Live Mesh are evolutionary, though Microsoft has made some important improvements to the user interface, such as having the Live Mesh bar remember its previous state and adding a 'superpan' feature to improve support for large monitors during remote sessions. Enterprise users can now also choose to enable authentication for Remote Desktop sessions, or disable this functionality altogether.

If you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you can now also drag and drop files to and from your browser.

You can find a more detailed list of new and improved features on the Live Mesh blog.

Box.net has been around for quite a while, but is still one of our favorite places to store documents online. Thanks to its integration with numerous online services, including Gmail, Zoho, picnick, and Scribd, box.net can not only store all your documents, but can also function as the hub of your virtual office.

One other nice feature of box.net is that you can share your files and folders with 'collaborators,' which makes it a good service to exchange files within a small business or among friends.

The storage limit for the free accounts is 1GB, which is plenty if you mostly exchange text documents or spreadsheets. Paid accounts start at $7.95 a month and include more advanced features, including 5GB of storage, a versioning system, mobile access, and 24/7 phone support.

Live Mesh

The online storage component of Live Mesh is only one part of Micorsoft's latest venture into cloud computing, but it is also one of its most compelling features at this point. Live Mesh gives you 5GB of online storage and an online desktop that looks a lot like Windows Vista. You can upload any type of file to Live Mesh, but you cannot edit any of your files through the online desktop. In the future, though, we expect Microsoft to start adding more of these features.

One of the main reasons we like Mesh is because it constantly watches for changes in the folders you are synchronizing to it and updates them automatically. In addition, you can share folders with friends, allowing you to collaborate on projects.

Live Mesh works on both Windows PCs and Macs.

DropBox

Few online storage services integrate with your desktop as well as DropBox, which only recently opened up to the public after an extensive beta test. While you do have to install a small program on your machine to run DropBox, it is well worth it. Besides setting up a folder on your machine, which automatically syncs with DropBox, you can also set DropBox up to then sync that folder with other machines, similar to Live Mesh. DropBox lets you upload any type of file, as long as it is smaller than 350MB. DropBox uses Amazon's S3 service as its storage solution and provides its users with 2GB of free storage. For $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, you can buy 50GB of storage.

One of our favorite features of DropBox is that it preserves every revision of every file. You can also easily share folders with your friends or colleagues.

DropBox supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Oosah

Oosah's main selling point is simple: you get a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for media files. One restriction of Oosah is that you can't use it for text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, which seems a bit weird, given that those types of files are generally small.

One interesting aspect of Oosah is that it accepts RAW image files from most camera manufacturers, though it automatically converts them into JPGs. You can also connect to your Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and view your images and videos from those services in one central place. Oosah also gives you Media RSS feeds and even a podcast feed for your audio files.

While we love Oosah for its general ease of use, the one aspect we really did not enjoy was the fact that uploading files seems to be unnecessarily hard. Oosah does not provide any desktop clients and while you can use the web based uploader to select multiple files, uploading multiple directories at a time is not an option.

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is the only service in this list that is not available for free - and technically, it is not even an online storage service. Instead, it provides a frontend to Amazon's S3 storage service. JungleDisk costs $20 and after that, you pay Amazon for the storage and transfer of your files. JungleDisk also lets you map your Amazon S3 storage space as a network drive on your computer, so that you can just drag and drop files back and forth between your online storage and your local desktop.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Other Services

Online storage is a competitive market. The best services integrate fully with your desktop and allow you to effortlessly upload and download files. They also provide you with an online desktop to access files from any computers and are stable and dependable. A service that does not fulfill these basic requirements is going to have a hard time convincing users to use and trust it.

There are, of course, a large number of other online storage services that we did not include in this list. BOXSTr, for example, is a great application, but it constantly bothers you with ads and attempts to sell you their premium service. AOL's Xdrive is a great service, too, but we have heard too many rumors that AOL is trying to sell the service or that they will simply close it to be able to recommend it anymore.

The one company that is suspiciously missing from this list is Google. While you can upload your documents to Google Docs, the company that has made cloud computing a household name does not have a dedicated file storage service. While rumors about the existence of a 'GDrive' have regularly appeared in the tech blogosphere over the last few year, users still have to rely on hacks like the GMail Drive shell extension to store their files on Google's servers.

What Did We Miss?

Do you have a favorite service that we did not list? Let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot.

While Wuala will happily sell you additional storage space (from $25 a year for 10GB to $1000 for 1TB), you can also trade your own local disk space for cloud storage space. If you share 5GB of space on your local drive, you will get an additional 5GB of online storage. Given how cheap hard disks have become, this seems like a fair trade-off. Users who share their local hard disk space can also turn off advertising on Wuala.

Wuala's client basically looks like a local folder and you can decide if you want to share any of your files stored on Wuala with either your friends or a group of users.

Encryption: The Good and the Bad

Even with the strong encryption Wuala uses, though, the fact that some information is going to be stored on machines outside of even Wuala's control is not going to sit well with a lot of people. While most private users can probably live with these risks (which are inherent in any cloud storage solution), businesses will probably stay very far away from Wuala.

There is also the question of how people will use Wuala - after all, the service provides almost unlimited and strongly encrypted storage. As Wuala has little control over what is shared on the network, Wuala might turn out to be a haven for rather unsavory activities. But then, the same can probably be said for most other cloud storage services as well.

Where's the Money?

The cloud storage market is highly competitive, but so far, no clear front-runner has emerged. Wuala's competitors include Box.net, Dropbox, Mozy, as well as Apple's Mobile Me and Microsoft's various online storage services, including SkyDrive and Mesh. There are also various software solutions to make backing up to Amazon's S3 more consumer friendly. All of these have different business models and feature sets, but Wuala's simplicity and P2P sharing approach will make it very competitive.

Collaboration on documents may be a part of the product as well. It's expected to be a simple, but powerful, service. A number of questions remain, however.

Ray Ozzie offered thinly veiled foreshadowing of Mesh at the Mix08 conference and described a product that offered the following:

"Just imagine the possibilities enabled by centralized configuration and personalization and remote control of all your devices from just about anywhere. Just imagine the convenience of unified data management, the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch."

Questions Remaining

Performance seems to be the biggest question around Live Mesh. The technology itself doesn't seem terribly unique, but if the program is able to deal with file editing conflicts and lost network connections, that will be good.

Storage size and allocation is another question that remains. It's assumed that SkyDrive will be central to the offering, but that program's 5MB 5 GB (Ha! typo) storage limit will need to change. Even double that will not likely be enough storage.

Finally, some magic previously unimagined would be nice. When Ozzie says, "Just imagine the possibilities enabled..." I can imagine that he's imagined some we haven't. What's up their sleeve?

Cross-platform functionality outside of the Windows environment may be a pipe-dream, but even so - Mesh could be a game changer for the majority of the world using said environment.

What would you like to see out of Live Mesh?