Don Wilson thoughts and ideals of an internet magnate

So, Google announced tonight their venture into cloud computing, database crunching, and, all things considered, a bad ass approach to helping development of web apps significantly easier. See Scoble’s Qik stream of the announcement here.

Basically Google will host a certain amount of storage, computation limit, and bandwidth for each developer and will eventually provide opportunities to PHP, RoR, and possibly other languages. The current beta cycle is limited to Python, which is definitely a plus in my favor since I’ve been looking to dive into Python for quite some time. What’s odd is that I literally purchased Learning Python yesterday and brought it to read between classes today. Little did I know that I would have a chance to really start using it on a quite limited (10,000) userbase platform.

What am I going to write using Google Apps Engine? I’m not too sure right now. Depending on it’s ability to communicate with the outside world, I might develop something with my new friend, Twitter. In the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about what services are already out there and a few that haven’t been invented yet (at least that I know of). Perhaps some type of centralizing system for geographic location, so that you could add “DallasTwit”, ping @DallasTwit, and in turn, DallasTwit relays the same message to all of it’s followers. Message relays will be limited to one relay per XX minutes, allowing for the service to work but not spam.

Hopefully no one steals that idea, but if they do, I’ve got a few hanging under my wing that I could venture into as well. If you’re interested in working with their API, check here.