• by Jonathan Blum , May 20, 2008

Open platforms open up ad space

 

Free e-mail is no longer enough for Google. The search giant is now taking a run at hosting full-on Web applications. This spring, the company announced a new online application hosting service, Google App Engine, that will open Google's massive online infrastructure to any developer, big or small.

All you will need is a Google App Engine account, the necessary Web development experience and the desire to follow Google's network requirements and you can place basically any application on Google's massive servers and reap the benefits of its connectivity.

"If you write a very popular application that generates a ton of traffic, Google's infrastructure will protect you, and at no up-front cost," says G. Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester Research who specializes in software delivered as a service over the Web. "You only pay for what you use."

The service is in beta and is free for now, but probably not for long. And already there are major issues: Popular development languages like Perl and .Net are not supported. Only Google's Web development language, Python, will be hosted. And it's not yet clear whether applications developed and hosted on Google can be transferred to other services, but don't count on it.

Still, development in Web-based application hosting is heating up. Amazon is in the space with its Amazon Web Services. IBM is developing something called Blue Cloud, and there are rumored services from Microsoft and other software players.

"Soon, any developer with a laptop and the know-how will be able to offer sophisticated products," Young says. And that, of course, portends a boom in online ad real estate.