In the company’s ongoing effort to woo users to the freshly-launched Google Drive storage service – which is heavily integrated with Google’s existing productivity tools – Google added more than 450 new fonts and 60 new templates to the online office suite. The new font selection augments the more serious selection of existing typefaces with options including “Lobster,” “Crafty Girls,” and “Cherry Cream Soda.” “Whether you’re looking for the perfect font for your first comic book or fancy handwriting for your wedding invitations, we hope you try out the new fonts and create some eye-catching documents,” wrote software engineer Isabella Ip in a sunny announcement. The same announcement highlighted other recent tweaks including screenreader support, changeable default page size for new documents, improved support for right-to-left languages, and new spreadsheet features. Google has banked on a cloud-based repertoire of products for years, but since its company-wide social networking push that culminated last summer in Google Plus, spokespersons have increasingly worked to unify cloud and social platforms in Googleplex oeuvre. “We’ve built cloud-based tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to help you connect and collaborate online with others more quickly and easily, without having to deal with the hassles and frustrations of installing and managing traditional software,” wrote vice president of engineering Venkat Panchapakesan, in a recent blog post. “Google Drive brings together many Google services – documents, spreadsheets, images and more – all in one place so you can easily create, collaborate, and share in real-time. Files are saved automatically, and friends, teammates, roommates, families and co-workers can do things together – even when they’re not.” Google Drive has taken a hammering, though, for ambiguous terms of use that could, in theory, leave the company room to co-opt uploaded content for their own use. And its competitors may be more nervous than they’re letting on; file storage service Dropbox responded to the service’s launch by upgrading their own free option to match Drive’s offering. Some commenters were underwhelmed for reasons that had nothing to do with Google’s size or strategy. “Oh good more shit to do on the computer,” wrote Google Plus user Summer Cox. “I have been wondering what to do with all my free time in the day now I know I can get on google docs and spend countless hours figuring out how to do something else that is a complete waste of time.”
