Some thoughts on the Google Web App Engine

Google recently launched their Google App Engine, a Python-based web application development framework you can use to easily create your own web application and, most importantly, deploy to Google's own scalable infrastructure. For free, you get 500MB of persistent storage space and enough bandwidth and CPU power to support about 5 million page views per month. This is a terrific initiative from Google which could easily extend their advertisement space, but could also enable developers to potentially earn revenue as well from simple web applications they develop and deploy by leveraging on the readily available infrastructure.

What's also interesting is that the environment has native support to interact with Google accounts, meaning that developers can leverage from the Google account infrastructure to manage the users registration, login, logout, security, etc., but also to profit from the huge, established user base. On the other hand, Google gets new users as applications become popular and new users which did not have a Google account before register for using the application. This is clearly a very smart move from Google and, depending on implementation details, could work as a great viral marketing strategy, besides the data collection / analysis and advertising potential behind the applications and users.

There is also a web app gallery. This new platform, combined with other google services such as gmail and the Open Social initiative seem to align into a plan where Google gets to play more strongly on the social networking space, probably competing more closely with Facebook. We have seen this game before: provide the infrastructure, the environment, the buzz, the documentation, the goodies, the networking, then enable third-parties to develop things on top, then benefit from the power of the whole network. See, for example, the Java Card Technology.

Maybe this is pushing it a bit too much, but I also think it is interesting to think about all this having in mind that also more and more PC desktop applications are moving to the web (see, for example, Adobe's photoshop express). Thinking of it that way, Google seems to be positioning itself as the Microsoft of the future online "OS", which turns out to be a web app framework with social networking capabilities and a terrific scalable platform behind it...