Microsoft announced several changes to its SkyDrive cloud storage service today, introducing features that improve the usability for its web and Windows Phone-based users. SkyDrive now supports the Open Document Format (ODF), an XML-based file format supported in a number of word processing apps including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and Corel's WordPerfect.

Although ODF support is the more noteworthy addition to SkyDrive, Microsoft has also added a few more features that it thinks are "pretty cool." These include an option to share files to Twitter from the SkyDrive web interface and the ability to upload 300MB files in the browser. Windows Phone users will be happy to hear that images shared via Twitter will now be shortened using Microsoft's sdrv.ms URL shortener, rather than a large link pointing to skydrive.com. Microsoft rounded off its SkyDrive announcement today with the promise of "some really big things coming soon," and with persistent rumors about an imminent release of Google Drive, we'd expect the company is ready for an inevitable head-to-head clash with Google.