Starting today — although not on my account, yet — Google Drive is supporting an activity stream in Google Drive, showing activity in all of your Drive or in specific selected folders and files. This has been done by changing how the old ‘details’ menu item works, which is now ‘details and activity’.

Ian Gunn, Google Drive Blog: A new activity stream in Drive shows you what’s changed

When you open Drive, click the ⓘ button in the top right corner and the activity stream will appear, showing you who has taken action on files and folders in My Drive. You’ll see a rundown of what your team has been doing, such as editing and commenting on notes, adding a new spreadsheet, renaming a presentation, and more.

Well, the images show it, although I can’t see it yet.

Should be rolling out worldwide over the next week.

The Bottom Line

The activity stream is good as far as it goes. A real help. But what’s missing? There doesn’t seem to be a way to add any commentary that would show up in the activity stream, like why a file was uploaded, or what changed in a version. Why doesn’t Google simply create a comment thread on every file and folder, and reflect any updates of those threads in the stream? This would help any coworkers share documents immensely.

Likewise, what about the comments buried in documents? If a colleague has entered comments inside a document those should also be reflected in the file and folder’s activity stream.