While Google doesn't offer online storage space for backing up your files or sharing media (other than photos and videos) with your friends, the company does provide users with a fair bit of online storage space. Gmail users get close to 3GB of data, while Picasa web users have 1GB of photo storage to play with.

Now Google has launched a new paid service to let you beef up your online storage for those two services. $1 a year will snag you 6GB of shared storage space that can be used for Picasa or Gmail. Or if you've got a ton of e-mail to save, you can try out these plans:

• 25GB for $75/year
• 100GB for $250/year
• 250GB for $500/year

If you've done the math, you probably realize that you can just sign up for 100 separate Google accounts and get 600GB for $100 a year, so the pricing seems a bit out of whack. But we'll just chalk that up to promotional pricing and the fact that there are plenty of other services out there providing 2-6GB of online storage space for free.

Odds are in the future we'll see other Google services added to this shared plan, including Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Update: It looks like Google has updated their pricing, and 6GB of online storage will cost you $20/year, not $1. We don't know if the initial pricing was a typo or a promotion that only lasted a few hours. But if you don't believe us, there is evidence that the price was originally $1.

[via Google Blogoscoped]