Catching up after a long Thanksgiving holiday...

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is adding yet another logical component to its online arsenal:

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

The Mountain View, Calif., company plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee, say the people familiar with the matter. Planned pricing isn't known.

I currently use Google's web page creation service, Google Pages, for temporarily storing documents I collect on the web while performing research, thus allowing me to work from different computers on the same task. The new file storage service will streamline that process significantly.

Google is hardly the only option for online storage. The WSJ article includes a graph listing other options, including web products from Microsoft and AOL.

[WSJ.com] Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data