Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it):

"Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future."

Specifically the app integration ecosystem they're creating with the Chrome Web Store is extremely interesting. There's documentation for developers here:

https://developers.google.com/drive/

Basically, you register your app against certain mime types, and then when users install your app into Chrome, they can now open those file types directly from Drive using your app, seamlessly.

It's Windows' "open with" dialogue, except on the Web. That's a big deal, because while everyone expected Drive to offer features that compete with Dropbox, this feature competes with operating systems. I think it's a brilliant move that shows Google thinking ahead and beyond what Dropbox is doing.

I'm about as asocial and celebratory of diversity as they come, and I love this essay, especially the conversational style. But I'd be careful not to take this argument too far into sophistry.

In school people clan and desperately look for some identity to copy. This leads to all the terrible social behavior you see in most secondary and high school in the U.S. Somebody calling you "weird" can really be a badge of honor.

But there's nothing to be gained in being different in itself. While you should be who you are, if you only define yourself in how weird you are compared to others you're doing the same thing, only in reverse. Instead of saying "I will look at my peers and copy them" you're saying "I will look at my peers and do the opposite" Both of these are just the same kind of herd thinking. Being weird? Awesome. Being deliberately different? Not so much. You need to do a gut check on this one. Schools are full of a bunch of people who all are very proud of being different, just like everybody else.

I also note that the gym conversation consisted of people comparing social preferences: sports teams, hollywood stars, and so on. These kinds of conversations form a type of social bonding -- a joining of group opinion (even if outliers are allowed). It's this very banter that creates the group identity that then shuns other people for being "weird".

People are some funny animals.

Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services.

A company I used to freelance for found that after they stopped paying Yelp for a premium account, they started seeing more negative reviews and a number of their positive reviews were filtered out. They got almost daily phone calls from Yelp marketing types essentially suggesting that if they renewed their subscription, the negative reviews would 'disappear'.

This was a few years ago, so maybe things have changed since then. Either way, I wouldn't hold your breath for a better review verification system.

Only in the hyperventilating startup bubble world can tracking people around a shopping mall with wifi be cooler than tracking your position anywhere on earth with satellites that were put there by huge rockets.

My inner ten-year old is leaping up and down with excitement right now. I've got visions of OMNI magazine illustrations from the 1980s in my head, with watercolors of mining ships and stylish orange-suited astronauts.

It's been so long since the future felt like it would match up to the optimistic sci-fi of a few decades ago, that I'd nearly forgotten. I know this is just one announcement of an intention, but I don't care, I'm going to go ahead and start dreaming again about seeing space elevators and terraformed moons and planets in my lifetime.

Great story to read before bed.