Google today released their cloud storage platform – Google Drive, that offers free storage of 5GB. Now all your data, your documents, photos, videos and all other stuff that you store on your Mac, PC or phone will always be with you all the time, on the move, everywhere.

You can keep all your files on Google Drive, share them with friends or colleagues. Not only you can store or read files, you can also create or make changes to your documents as Google Drive has Google Docs integrated within it. You can share your documents in real-time with your friends or colleagues and work on documents simultaneously and can also leave comments on shared content. You can also attach files to an email in Gmail directly from Google Drive.

You can search your content using keywords, filter content by file type, name or owner. You can also search for text in the scanned images of documents. Drive has integrated Optical Character Recognition technology that recognizes text in scanned images.

Google Drive also has image search integrated (using Goggles) within it that enables you to search your photos within your Drive. You can install Google Drive on your Mac, PC or Android device (Google Play Store). Google Drive for iPhone and iPad is under works and will be released soon.

Drive also comes with the ability to integrate third-party apps to increase productivity. Apps like WeVideo for video editing, SlideRocket for presentations, AutoCAD WS for drawings/designing and many more. Visit Chrome Web Store to check out more apps.

Initially Google Drive offers you free storage of 5GB which you can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 per month, 100GB for $4.99 per month and also 1TB for $49.99 per month. On Drive upgrade your Gmail account storage also increases to 25GB.

Google Drive would certainly give other cloud storage platforms like DropBox, Box.net and SkyDrive a very tough competition making a little hard for them to stay alive.

If you can’t access your Google Drive check out this webpage at Google Drive help.

Have you checked out the Google Drive cloud services? Let us know what you think about it.

SOURCE: Official Google Blog