While competitors must label themselves as niche solutions (for example, Bing is your source for travel, sports, and entertainment), Google is trying to cover every possible element of internet technology. As a pioneer in many of the fields they’ve claimed, they certainly earned the right. One of the areas that saw greater attention in the last year is web-based productivity software. There’s certainly no shortage of useful features in their Google Docs platform — and now Google team members are extending some productivity functionality to other locations on the web through the use of Chrome extensions.
The release that brings attention to Google’s efforts is the Web Clipboard, a Docs-based utility that can be found in Chrome’s growing extension gallery. Using this utility, users can copy web information to the clipboard, then paste that information into any other field in the browser. The feature is designed to offer several advantages over standard copy/paste, including:
- The ability to save your clipboard records to the cloud, preventing your clipboard from wiping on computer reset.
- The copying of root HTML content, allowing you to copy code, images, and even iframes to your clipboard.
- Multiple clipboard items, meaning you can store and paste as many different clipboard items as you require.
- The ability to customize your clipboard menu options.
The Web Clipboard was released several months ago, but saw a new release in January and a recent push in publicity from the Google team. While this is by no means the first extension developed in-house by Google, and certainly isn’t the only productivity enhancement released is recent months, it does show us continued dedication to productivity solutions from Google — despite some fears that the company may shift away from such efforts with the hierarchy change from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page.
