The new Google Gadget Builder for Organizations looks like the easiest way there is to build a widget for webpages or a gadget for iGoogle. Intended for nonprofit organizations, the Gadget Builder lets widget authors combine RSS feeds, YouTube video playlists and links to donate or join the email list serve for your organization.

That sounds great, until you start kicking the tires. On the same week Google launched it's ballyhooed App Engine, which offers powerful Google-style development architecture and gobs of free hosting and scaling - nonprofits get stuck with a substandard builder for widgets that Google won't even host for them.

Below is one that I built, there's very little customization enabled in the wizard but you could substitute some of the image files once they were on your own server. The service is probably best for organizations that want to look pathetic and out-of-date right away.

"Remember, your gadget will only bring people to your web site if they know about it, so be sure to follow all four [of the following promotional] steps," the Widget Builder's last page says. The fourth step is to buy AdSense to promote your nonprofit widget. How tasteless.

Did I mention that Google won't even host your nonprofit widgets for you? The day after they announced their new program to provide free scalable hosting for for-profit applications?

Organizations interested in a more powerful option should check out the even easier to use SproutBuilder. SproutBuilder comes with built-in distribution hooks, unlike this Google Gadget that prompts people to do nothing but add a widget to a Google page. It's pretty absurd.

Earlier today our Josh Catone interviewed 37Signal founder Jason Fried about the striking similarities between one of Google's App Engine demos, HuddleChat (a real-time chat application) and the Campfire app from 37Signals. Fried told RWW that "we're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout". He went on to say that "we thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for." Well Fried's protests seem to have worked, as Google has now taken down HuddleChat.

On our earlier post, Google didn't respond to our request for a comment at the time. However tonight Pete Koomen, Product Manager of the Google App Engine Team left a comment on ReadWriteWeb to say that they'd "taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery." Koomen went on to explain:

"The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick. We've heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down."

It's all a storm in a teacup, because this was just supposed to be a demo app. It was built internally at Google after all, and wasn't meant to be an official Google product that competed with 37Signals' Campfire. Techcrunch's Michael Arrington claims that "this is the first case of censorship on the new Google App Engine platform, and a bad precedent." That's probably going too far, as this was something that was built by Google employees and so I think Google has the right to pull it - if they feel that it reflects badly on them.

More than that though, I'd suggest that Google just doesn't want the latest blogtroversy to get out of hand (as these things are wont to do). But have they given it a second wind instead? ;-)

Today, Adobe is releasing the 1.0 version of its Media Player (AMP) software to the public. The player, which is an offline Flash video manager comparable to the Veoh player, was first released as a beta on the Adobe Labs site last September.

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

AMP is basically a desktop Flash video manager that organizes streaming and downloadable video content. Users can find and watch content in AMP, as well as subscribe to shows and have updates pushed directly out to them via the player. Adobe is launching its media player with an impressive list of content partners, including CBS, MTV Networks (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, etc.), Universal Music Group, PBS, CondéNet (WIRED, Epicurious, etc.), and Scripps Networks (Food Network, Fine Living, etc.).

"It's a merger of TV Guide and DVR for Internet video content," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release.

Because Flash has native support for high res video, AMP can display videos in 1080p, 720p or 480i. Indeed, the video in the Adobe Media Player looked very nice, even when streaming. Adobe doesn't host any content, but merely facilitates the delivery from CDN to user. AMP pulls content from partners via RSS feeds -- and users can add any video RSS feed into the player.

Right now, AMP will only display content by default of partners who have a relationship with Adobe. Interested content creators can email Adobe to get their content into AMP. Anyone, however, can seed content externally via an RSS feed. Adobe pulls channel branding directly from RSS feeds as well, so even content providers who have no relationship with Adobe can create branded channels in AMP -- the downside is those channels will only be available to users who add them via an external RSS link, and not in the application's global catalog.

According to Adobe Media Player Product Manager Ashley Still, at some point in the next year or so, Adobe plans to go the user generated content route and make it easier for people to add content directly into AMP's catalog. For now, though, that requires a relationship with Adobe's biz dev team.

Only content providers who have a relationship with Adobe will also be able to utilize Adobe's adserving technology to sell ads on a rev share basis on their videos in the media player. AMP supports pre, post, and mid roll ads, as well as overlay ads and the ability to serve advertising to downloaded videos offline. Offline ads on older downloaded content can be dynamically updated anytime the user connects to the web.

Adobe is also announcing the launch of Adobe TV. Adobe TV is a web site and AMP channel dedicated to aggregating Adobe's array of video blogs and tutorials. These videos had previously been scattered all across the Adobe web universe, on numerous blogs and web sites. Adobe TV brings them under a single umbrella and makes it easier for Adobe fans and users to find those videos or subscribe to them in the new media player software.

Conclusion

Adobe sees the release of AMP as a piece of their "ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next-generation broadcast entertainment." We see it as a showcase for Flash video -- which is getting competition from Microsoft's Silverlight -- and AIR. There is no better way to show off your developers tools than to demonstrate something cool that was made with them.

It is also another piece in Adobe's growing online empire. In October, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that within the next ten years Adobe applications would all be completely in the cloud. That's an ambitious goal, but Adobe recognizes that web apps are the future. The full power of Illustrator or Premiere operating in the cloud might be more then 10 years away, but by using their web application stack (Flash, Flex, AIR, etc.) to push out less complex consumer apps, Adobe is betting that it can get the mainstream used to the idea of web applications and get developers hooked on Adobe tools in the process. That's a smart play.

Today, Adobe is releasing the 1.0 version of its Media Player (AMP) software to the public. The player, which is an offline Flash video manager comparable to the Veoh player, was first released as a beta on the Adobe Labs site last September.

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

AMP is basically a desktop Flash video manager that organizes streaming and downloadable video content. Users can find and watch content in AMP, as well as subscribe to shows and have updates pushed directly out to them via the player. Adobe is launching its media player with an impressive list of content partners, including CBS, MTV Networks (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, etc.), Universal Music Group, PBS, CondéNet (WIRED, Epicurious, etc.), and Scripps Networks (Food Network, Fine Living, etc.).

"It's a merger of TV Guide and DVR for Internet video content," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release.

Because Flash has native support for high res video, AMP can display videos in 1080p, 720p or 480i. Indeed, the video in the Adobe Media Player looked very nice, even when streaming. Adobe doesn't host any content, but merely facilitates the delivery from CDN to user. AMP pulls content from partners via RSS feeds -- and users can add any video RSS feed into the player.

Right now, AMP will only display content by default of partners who have a relationship with Adobe. Interested content creators can email Adobe to get their content into AMP. Anyone, however, can seed content externally via an RSS feed. Adobe pulls channel branding directly from RSS feeds as well, so even content providers who have no relationship with Adobe can create branded channels in AMP -- the downside is those channels will only be available to users who add them via an external RSS link, and not in the application's global catalog.

According to Adobe Media Player Product Manager Ashley Still, at some point in the next year or so, Adobe plans to go the user generated content route and make it easier for people to add content directly into AMP's catalog. For now, though, that requires a relationship with Adobe's biz dev team.

Only content providers who have a relationship with Adobe will also be able to utilize Adobe's adserving technology to sell ads on a rev share basis on their videos in the media player. AMP supports pre, post, and mid roll ads, as well as overlay ads and the ability to serve advertising to downloaded videos offline. Offline ads on older downloaded content can be dynamically updated anytime the user connects to the web.

Adobe is also announcing the launch of Adobe TV. Adobe TV is a web site and AMP channel dedicated to aggregating Adobe's array of video blogs and tutorials. These videos had previously been scattered all across the Adobe web universe, on numerous blogs and web sites. Adobe TV brings them under a single umbrella and makes it easier for Adobe fans and users to find those videos or subscribe to them in the new media player software.

Conclusion

Adobe sees the release of AMP as a piece of their "ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next-generation broadcast entertainment." We see it as a showcase for Flash video -- which is getting competition from Microsoft's Silverlight -- and AIR. There is no better way to show off your developers tools than to demonstrate something cool that was made with them.

It is also another piece in Adobe's growing online empire. In October, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that within the next ten years Adobe applications would all be completely in the cloud. That's an ambitious goal, but Adobe recognizes that web apps are the future. The full power of Illustrator or Premiere operating in the cloud might be more then 10 years away, but by using their web application stack (Flash, Flex, AIR, etc.) to push out less complex consumer apps, Adobe is betting that it can get the mainstream used to the idea of web applications and get developers hooked on Adobe tools in the process. That's a smart play.

Fifteen or so years into the evolution of the web, we already have many of the key ideas and technologies in place to start describing and sharing personal preference information - or what we might colloquially call "taste" - in order to personalize web experiences. So, why haven't we yet seen widespread adoption of web personalization? Mostly because user expectations and online business models haven't yet evolved to the point that user-controlled, ‘open taste’ sharing is a viable option. However, the dataportability.org initiative suggests that we may have reached a turning point.

This is a guest post by Dr. Rick Hangartner, MyStrands Chief Scientist.

The DataPortability project taps into the strong conviction, engendered by the do-it-yourself nature of the web 2.0 movement, that individuals should "have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it". This extends to an inherent belief that that it has not been a lack of effective technology that has held back this new culture of open data sharing, but rather business models that have been over-reliant on laying a proprietary claim to some portion of that data.

Taste sharing is a DataPortability use case

We express our online tastes any time we make a choice between the various alternatives available to us. Some of our choices may be characterized by the number of times we select each option when repeatedly confronted with the same choice - for example the number of songs of each genre we play when we select music. Other choices may be expressed subjectively, such as assigning one to five stars to movies we watch, when we are asked to rate our preferences for the different alternatives. In yet other cases, we may in effect be giving estimates for the number of times we would expect to select each alternative, such as when we are asked if we are likely to buy a product or vote for something. Virtually any online experience we have includes one or more instances in which we make conscious choices reflecting our preferences.

For the more theoretically inclined amongst us, we can view a choice as somewhat analogous to a random experiment and our relative preferences as measures of the different possible outcomes of the experiment. The collection of such experiments that we participate in as a matter of course in our web experiences paints a vivid picture of our taste. For the more pragmatic: each time we make choices, we generate data which empirically describes our preferences. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like any other picture, blog post, video, or other piece of online content that we create; and which the DataPortability project is focused on.

A few ideas for open taste sharing

As a DataPortability use case, open taste sharing embodies and embraces the culture shift that the Web 2.0 movement represents. With regard to data ownership, the DataPortability concept has even more succinct expression: our tastes should be ours to share, or not. This puts the user in control of their online experience, so they can set the boundaries of how much they want to share and with whom. Similarly, there is no need to invent new or proprietary technologies to simply identify, encapsulate, and share taste-related data.

A little thought by websites about how to identify and summarize our relative preferences on their site is enough to do the job - along with OpenID, OAuth, and a little task-specific XML for markup. However clearly this kind of data sharing also raises new privacy concerns, which is part of the work-in-progress for the entire DataPortability project.

Image by MyStrands

Perhaps the most interesting challenge lies in educating businesses to thoroughly and thoughtfully examine their current ideas about user data, so they can better understand and enthusiastically embrace The Web 2.0 Golden Rule: "Do for other web experiences providers as they would do for you - under our control as the owners of our taste data - and the blessings of networks effects for taste data shall be yours."

This is a guest post by Dr. Rick Hangartner, MyStrands Chief Scientist. You can follow Dr. Hangartner on the MyStrands blog.

Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won't dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.

There are two main reasons for why desktop access for web apps is important:

• It will actually help make web apps more popular.
• Running a ton of apps in the browser at once is a pain.

The Desktop is the Key to Making Web Apps Mainstream

As I commented in Sarah's post yesterday, for those of us who read blogs like ReadWriteWeb, using web apps has become second nature. Putting data in the cloud makes sense, and the thought of being offline for more than 10 minutes per day seems ludicrous. But I suspect that's not the case for everyone.

For many mainstream users, I think the idea of storing your data in the cloud is kind of creepy (that's the word my girlfriend used the other day when I was explaining to her how things like Google Docs work). Giving those people access to the software in the traditional form of a desktop application will, in my opinion, help push them gently toward web applications. Get them hooked on Google Docs on the desktop, convince them of the convenience of having anywhere access to the app on the web, and then you might start seeing people really embrace web apps as they get more comfortable with the idea.

The conversation I had with my girlfriend went something like this (paraphrasing heavily here):

Her: "So where are my documents stored?"
Me: "On Google's servers."
Her: "And I don't actually own the software?"
Me: "No, you just sort of rent it."
Her: "So if Google goes down, or decides to stop making Docs, they take my software and documents with it?"
Me: "Theoretically that could happen, yeah."
Her: "And if there's a security breach my documents are there for the taking?"
Me: "Technically, yes."
Her: "That's kinda creepy.... I don't think I like that."

I think that's a fairly standard view among mainstream software users. So, desktop access becomes important as a means to an end. Web apps will have a much smoother road to mass mainstream adoption if offline/desktop versions are used as a bridge.

The Browser is No Place for Multitasking

Looking at my Windows taskbar right now, I have copies of Thunderbird, Trillian, Photoshop, FeedDemon, Notepad, Word, Winamp, and Twhirl running. Sure, I could run web app equivalents of each of those in the browser -- GMail, Meebo, Aviary Phoenix, Google Reader, Docs, Pandora, and a Twitter module in Netvibes might suffice. But they'd all be running in Firefox at once (oh, Firefox is also running on my system right now).

Managing those apps from the desktop is pretty simple. Managing them all at once in Firefox would be a nightmare, and would likely start to make Firefox unstable and act naughty. That's precisely the reason FreshBooks launched a desktop app today using Mozilla Prism. "One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave," wrote Freshbooks developer Rich Lafferty.

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, "Adobe AIR isn't just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages - not hosting applications."

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn't arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Conclusion

There is a third reason desktop/offline access is important: web access isn't yet ubiquitous. There are plenty of times when connecting to the Internet just isn't happening, and having access to your data and your software on the desktop is definitely beneficial during those times. But, as Sarah wrote yesterday, no access is becoming more the exception than the rule. Every day offline access is becoming less and less important for applications, but desktop access is still necessary.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won't dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.

There are two main reasons for why desktop access for web apps is important:

• It will actually help make web apps more popular.
• Running a ton of apps in the browser at once is a pain.

The Desktop is the Key to Making Web Apps Mainstream

As I commented in Sarah's post yesterday, for those of us who read blogs like ReadWriteWeb, using web apps has become second nature. Putting data in the cloud makes sense, and the thought of being offline for more than 10 minutes per day seems ludicrous. But I suspect that's not the case for everyone.

For many mainstream users, I think the idea of storing your data in the cloud is kind of creepy (that's the word my girlfriend used the other day when I was explaining to her how things like Google Docs work). Giving those people access to the software in the traditional form of a desktop application will, in my opinion, help push them gently toward web applications. Get them hooked on Google Docs on the desktop, convince them of the convenience of having anywhere access to the app on the web, and then you might start seeing people really embrace web apps as they get more comfortable with the idea.

The conversation I had with my girlfriend went something like this (paraphrasing heavily here):

Her: "So where are my documents stored?"
Me: "On Google's servers."
Her: "And I don't actually own the software?"
Me: "No, you just sort of rent it."
Her: "So if Google goes down, or decides to stop making Docs, they take my software and documents with it?"
Me: "Theoretically that could happen, yeah."
Her: "And if there's a security breach my documents are there for the taking?"
Me: "Technically, yes."
Her: "That's kinda creepy.... I don't think I like that."

I think that's a fairly standard view among mainstream software users. So, desktop access becomes important as a means to an end. Web apps will have a much smoother road to mass mainstream adoption if offline/desktop versions are used as a bridge.

The Browser is No Place for Multitasking

Looking at my Windows taskbar right now, I have copies of Thunderbird, Trillian, Photoshop, FeedDemon, Notepad, Word, Winamp, and Twhirl running. Sure, I could run web app equivalents of each of those in the browser -- GMail, Meebo, Aviary Phoenix, Google Reader, Docs, Pandora, and a Twitter module in Netvibes might suffice. But they'd all be running in Firefox at once (oh, Firefox is also running on my system right now).

Managing those apps from the desktop is pretty simple. Managing them all at once in Firefox would be a nightmare, and would likely start to make Firefox unstable and act naughty. That's precisely the reason FreshBooks launched a desktop app today using Mozilla Prism. "One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave," wrote Freshbooks developer Rich Lafferty.

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, "Adobe AIR isn't just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages - not hosting applications."

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn't arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Conclusion

There is a third reason desktop/offline access is important: web access isn't yet ubiquitous. There are plenty of times when connecting to the Internet just isn't happening, and having access to your data and your software on the desktop is definitely beneficial during those times. But, as Sarah wrote yesterday, no access is becoming more the exception than the rule. Every day offline access is becoming less and less important for applications, but desktop access is still necessary.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The knock on the type of representative democracy that is employed in the US is that the people aren't actually voting on the legislation that gets passed -- representatives for the people are doing it for them. And those representatives are potentially beholden to outside influences like political action committees and lobbyists who help them raise money necessary to get elected. The system is supposed to weed out the bad eggs via regular elections (if your rep isn't representing you, don't vote for he or she next time around), but maybe that's not good enough. Enter Govit, a site that lets citizens weigh in on bills currently being voted on in the US House and Senate.

Govit lists every piece of active legislation currently before the United States Congress and lets users vote yes/no or abstain on each. From the voting page for each bill, users can also send a message directly to their government representatives urging them to vote a specific way, or send a message to their friends doing the same. Govit can also compare your votes to those of your representatives, those of Congress at large, and to the rest of Govit.

Govit acts something like a social network for politics. Each member of the House or Senate gets their own profile on the site that has a bio, fundraising information, and voting record, as well as how that member of Congress stacks up against Govit -- do their votes match the will of the people? Users can rate Congressional members, comment on them, and say whether or not they would vote for them.

On a more personal level, Govit allows members to befriend each other, which basically just lets you to compare your voting record to that of your friends if you have your profile set to public view. Unfortunately, by setting Govit up as a social network, the site becomes sort of a microcosm view of the American political system at large -- or at least it has the potential to. If we pretend that Govit becomes popular enough to actually have a national impact (i.e., politicians actually start paying attention to it), because it is set up in a manner where people are encouraged to shill for votes, it is easy to imagine the same back room dealing that goes on in Washington taking place on the site.

It's hard to look at Govit as the true "will of the people" because users have the option to make their votes public -- thus creating the potential for groupthink. Perhaps that is the will of the people anyway, but it would be easier to trust Govit's numbers if users at least didn't know who was voting which way until after the final ballot was cast. In other words: secret ballots tend to yield better results.

Still, Govit provites a useful tool for keeping track of what Congress is talking about, discussing it with like-minded folks, and seeing how your representatives match up with your own views. If you and your congressman are consistently voting on opposite ends of the spectrum, you might think twice about voting for he or she next term.

It seems like everyone is on Twitter these days, but are you following everyone you should? With so many users, it can be hard to find the right people to follow - you might even miss finding some of your very own friends on the service, especially if they joined later on, after you did your initial search for friends. To help you out, we've provided five web apps that can help you locate some of the best people for you to follow on Twitter.

1. Twubble

A new little Twitter app has recently burst onto the scene, and this one, despite its silly name, isn't any trouble at all - it's actually quite great. The app is called "Twubble" and it's designed to help you find interesting people to follow, a task it accomplishes by searching your social graph.

Using Twubble is very easy - simply visit the Twubble web site and click "find some friends." If you aren't already logged into Twitter, you'll need to input your credentials, otherwise, Twubble will just begin fetching a list of friends. The friends are ranked by how many of your friends are following them, and then, with one click, just as if you were on Twitter itself, you can follow your newfound friends.

Twubble

2. Twitter Local

Twitter Local is a handy service that helps you find people using Twitter in or around a certain area. You can enter a city, state, or zip, and the range of miles around the area to search, and Twitter Local will display the rests generated as an RSS or XML feed or you can click to see the latest tweets coming from that area and just subscribe to people from there. Twitter Local even has an Adobe AIR app available.

Twitter Local

3. TwitterWho

Know your friend's name or email but not their Twitter username? You can enter one or more email address or names into the search box on TwitterWho, which will then retrieve a list of possible matches, if the name is common, or the link to a person's Twitter profile if it makes a match by email address. The tool uses Twitter's built-in people search at twitter.com/invitations, but unlike that form, you can enter in multiple items at a time, one email or name per line, as opposed to having to search out your friends one-by-one. (Plus, it's not broken, like Twitter search was a few minutes ago).

Twitter Who

4. Twits Like Me

The app called "Twits Like Me" is designed to help you find other Twitter users who share your interests. To use the service, enter your username in the box provided and click "who is like me?" The service searches for other users who tweet about the same things you do. Don't forget to check the box to exclude your current friends from the search results if you're using the service to find new people to add.

Twits Like Me

5. TwitDir

Now that you've added some friends, how about adding some of the more prolific twitterers? The site TwitDir can help you locate some of the top Twitterers, in the following categories: the Top 100 Followed (looks like Jason beat Scoble - bribes do work!), the Top 100 updaters, the Top 100 favoriters, and the Top 100 followers. Want to get on one of these lists, the new "tops" section shows you what numbers you would have to beat to get there.

TwitDir

Google's new App Engine will let application developers outsource hosting and data storage for their applications by using key elements of Google's infrastructure.

As many people have noticed, the announcement just screams out for analysis in light of Nick Carr's new book The Big Switch.

Carr outlines the history of electric power generation moving from an in-house operation of every business to its current position as a commodity produced by giant specialized power producers and sold at a metered rate. He argues that computing is undergoing an analogous process and that just as commoditized electricity changed the world, so too will commodified computing. The same industrial history has had to struggle with monopoly power, though, and that's something that has to be considered when looking at announcements like Google's App Engine.

Richard MacManus provided an overview of the announcement last night and John Musser at Programmable Web provides a good overview of the technical details. There's an official Google video intro on the right. Most interested developers have already jumped in and looked at as much as they are able to access, though - so now it's time to talk context and consequences.

Scalability

Services like App Engine may very well represent history's next logical layer of abstraction, taking several onerous obstacles off of the to-do list of application developers. That means developers can focus on other things and leverage greater resources than they may have had access to otherwise. Google-sized economies of scale can beat just about anyone on price and in theory it bodes well for uptime. The all-to-frequent downtime experienced by customers of Amazon Web Services begs the question of Service Level Agreements for the Google App Engine - and there doesn't appear to to be any right now. Let's presume that all of that is going to get worked out in time, though. As Carr points out in The Big Switch, the early days of commodified electricity were also filled with worry about safety and reliability. There was an economic imperative to solve those problems, and except for externalities like damage to river ecosystems, asthma from coal plants and nuclear toxification of Native American land, the problems of safety and reliability have been solved in for electricity. Those aren't off-topic matters, either, see Carr's own coverage of Google's new giant server farm here in Oregon, where they want cheap electricity from our rivers to power the apps in App Engine.

Carr says in his book that progress towards technological advancement is more an economic imperative than it is a psychosis or a choice. See the above externalities and ask yourself about psychosis, but point taken - things like commodified computing make so much economic sense that they are in all likelihood inescapable.

Data Portability

It's up to you to decide to use Google Accounts as user authentication in your App Engine app, or to write your own authentication code. Developers tell me that porting these apps out of App Engine should require as little as rewriting some data storage code and perhaps a few webservices - but I'm not hearing people complain about the system being to confining. That's great.

It's very, very important that there be no barriers to leaving App Engine and that the service retains customers based on price and superior service. Anything else, any lock-in, will drive a stake through the heart of innovation.

I expected to hear about OpenSocial support for App Engine, but haven't yet. Hopefully standards discussions have been underway for some time, but it appears that other than being written in a single coding language - Apps will be pretty free to come and go.

It's not ala Carte

Amazon Web Services lets developers pick and choose between a handful of different services, including data storage and processing. Many startups, for example, just use AWS storage and do processing on their own servers. Google App Engine is an all-or-nothing offering and that's a little bit creepy. There may have been factory owners in the early days of commodified electricity who wanted to keep some parts of that world in-house too, so perhaps Google's all-in-one offering will seem reasonable in the future.

Advertising

The fact that Google is now offering to power and host web apps, many of which are only ever monetized by AdSense, is...convenient, for Google. Will other ad networks be allowed on Google App Engine servers? That Google is ultimately in the business of advertising against content and now will sell you a printing press may be nothing more than fair, but it certainly raised concerns about monopolistic conglomerates.

Google's dominance of online advertising is so severe, and the umbrella for innovators that such dominance affords is so large, that it can't help but raise concerns about a single corporate allegiance running between so many development teams in leadership positions in the web 2.0 economy. Now the App Engine feels a little like the minor-leauges, or a place for innovative sharecroppers, all brought together by the Google Dollar and the resources it can provide.

Competing Services

Competition is good. Amazon Web Services already faced some competition from services like Longjump (our coverage), Nirvanix and other cloud computing services (see Larry Dignan's discussion yesterday). Adding Google to the mix could turn up the volume on competition for customer loyalty.

While Google App Engine is only being previewed right now, there's already some people asking wether comparing it to Amazon Web Services is a matter of apples and oranges.

Bret Taylor, the former Google App Engine Project Manager and now founder of red-hot startup FriendFeed, couches his questions in some very nice words about the project.

I am impressed. The App Engine team has done a fantastic job, and I think they have already changed the way I do hobby projects.

The next logical question is: would I run a real business on infrastructure that is so different than everyone else's? If I change my mind about App Engine, what are my options? I am hoping a number of open source projects spring up as alternatives to lower the switching costs over the next year. I will be very interested to see how many startups take the leap and run on App Engine entirely in the meantime.

Taylor posted about his experience testing out App Engine on a lightweight blog that he wrote on the platform itself.

Taylor isn't alone in saying that so far, Google App Engine is a relatively simplistic offering. There's a substantial number of people feeling unsure about Python being the only language being supported at launch, as well, though Google says that other languages will be supported in the future.

The point is, Google App Engine may be neither competitive nor monopolistic - it might just be trivial as Google Pages or Google Base.

So far it seems pretty simple and useful, though. We'll have to take a deep breath, hope that Amazon and others step up their offerings a notch or two in response, and see what the future brings.