Web developers have had a few days to consider the impact of Google's App Engine, which lets third-party developers run applications on Google servers. In the initial beta phase, the first 10,000 developers to apply get 500MB of hosted space and five million page views per month for free.

Dave Winer, a blogging pioneer, wrote that App Engine could unleash “shrink-wrap Net apps” for Web users. App Engine could turn out to be “a standardized platform,” he wrote. “PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer. Now Google is taking the black magic out of operating a scalable Web app.”

But there is mounting concern that App Engine could let Google dominate the next generation of Web applications. “No matter how much your user base and technology [are] worth, almost no company will be willing to purchase your idea because of the high cost of migrating that code out of Google,” Clint Ecker wrote on Ars Technica.

Slowly Controlling the Web

While using Google's infrastructure could lead to new developments in Web programming, Google's access to application user data, trends and behaviors could boost the company's already formidable power.

With App Engine, “they slowly gain control of a major portion of the Web,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, in an e-mail.

But with cloud computing advancing, Google is hardly the only player looking at a platform role. The primary player right now is Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, but clearly EMC, Sun, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are building up their own clouds. So the criticism of Google may be a bit self-serving, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT.

Storm Clouds

Indeed, Amazon-funded 37Signals managed a little buzz kill for App Engine this week, accusing Google of ripping off its Campfire real-time chat app with a similar-looking program called Huddle Chat. All 37Signals apps run on EC2.

“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,” 37Signals founder Jason Fried told the ReadWriteWeb blog. “We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.”

Google moved quickly to pull the app. In a message on the huddlechat.com domain, Google wrote, “Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We've heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we've decided to take it down.”

But ReadWriteWeb readers were generally unimpressed with Fried's position. “There are only so many ways a chat application can look without going overboard,” a reader named Matt wrote. “Both companies took the “less is more” approach and, surprise surprise, they look similar … go figure.”