The first day of Google I/O seemed like a coming out party for Google App Engine, the company’s competitive threat to Amazon AWS. For one, the registrations were thrown open to everyone, and for another, two new APIs were released: the image manipulation API, and (more interesting to web app hosting in general), the memcache API. Now the memcache API was something I expected from Amazon a long time ago, but perhaps they don’t use it themselves as much so it’s not in AWS.

With Yahoo in limbo and Microsoft missing in action on the Internet, Google is making a huge play for developer mindshare. As Microsoft and Sun both demonstrated very effectively, focusing on getting developers excited and making them happy is the key to the success of a platform. Google I/O appears to be Google’s big play for developers. And so far it seems to be working. Continue »