Google Drive - exciting, but...

[Eliezer Israel]

Part of what's been guiding me is Murray Silverstein's description of the original patterns work - that they set up file folders in a Berkeley living room, dropped in all sorts of materials as they worked over the course of years, and then went back, refined, sifted, collated, wrote up...

In those days, that needed colocation.  Now, we can do the same gig on the web.

So - Google Drive got my wheels turning.  The tools for shared folders are all there - and they've done all the work that I'd rather not repeat - supporting all sorts of doc types, collaborative editing, etc. 

I'm thinking that attracting the right users to the right folders, and helping people looking for particular folders find them is really most of what's need to wrap this service and make a global Berkeley living room file folder.

BUT ... I'm running up against trouble understanding how that's possible.  

I'd love to embed a Gdocs/Gdrive folder on a web page, and have the website just be there to categorize/tag/relate folders and thus help people find the right ones.  I don't see how to do this w/ the google APIs.  Is it blocked?  GDrive seems accesible just from chrome apps.  What am I missing?

L

[Eliezer Israel]

Ok - it's a question of angle. 'gdrive' doesn't let you do this, but it looks like it may be possible to embed a Google docs folder.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/sites/ask-a-question/rTLs1YY0PxA

Is this ringing anyone else's bell?  Something about this has poetry to me. 

[Eliezer Israel]

Theo - do you have any insight into this from your recent explorations?

[Theo Armour]

Lev

 

Tons (I think)

 

But I won't get to it for a few hours…

 

Off the top of my head:

 

Play Google Docs over gDrive because the API is established, robust and being actively developed.

 

Features I noted:

 

Playing with the gDrive the other day, I noted that files could only be in one folder at a time, whereas in gDocs a file can be in multiple folders – meaning that folders can be used to build a complex tagging system.

 

In gDocs you get comments by bubble (location) and comments in sidebar (whole document)

 

More later…

 

Theo

[Eliezer Israel]

As far as I dug, there are ways to embed folders in a Google site.

I haven't yet found the right API/tooling to embed folders in non-google sites - perhaps because of the logon/id issue.  

Makes me wonder about other cloud storage systems - box and the like.

Interested what the options are for something like this.

[Theo Armour]

Lev

 

Here's an example of a stand-alone web page accessing a single Google Docs spreadsheet:

 

http://jsfiddle.net/JFSIII/dw2aP/6/

 

BTW, jsfiddle is a superb way of collaborating on writing code.

 

More tomorrow…

 

Theo

[Eliezer Israel]

Theo - you know about the coolest sites.

Fun!

[Theo Armour]

Lev

 

Your wish list is my command line…

 

Theo

 

 

From: pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com [mailto:pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Eliezer Israel

Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 6:18 AM
To: pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com