I saw the live Scoble feed on the Google App Engine announcement, so here are the details:

For a well-written app, Google says this should equate to [...]]]> Update: The 10k limit has already been hit. Wow. < 15 mins.

I saw the live Scoble feed on the Google App Engine announcement, so here are the details:

• 500MB storage
• Available to the first 10,000 developers as of 9PM PST
• 10GB Bandwidth/day
• 200 Million megacycle CPU/day
• Python code only

For a well-written app, Google says this should equate to something around 5 million page views/month. As for the Python code restriction, Google says it’s only temporary. To focus on just this issue is to not capture the bigger picture of what Google’s broader intentions are.

The whole point of Google App Engine is to take on the web platform space, and the first company that comes to mind when you think competition is Amazon. Now, I’m not sure that it’ll “take off” immediately given that it’ll be in essentially private beta, but I think Google going into this space has the potential to disrupt or otherwise take a bite out of Amazon.

Some services shown were Jaiku (ported to App Engine), Vorby(blank page as of writing), and Barbound(sorry no linky). Some reported that one of the reasons Google bought Jaiku was to demo it. It’s left to be seen whether Jaiku becomes more stable as a result – it might just turn out to be a good example of what can be done by hosting with Google. That is left to be seen however.

One of the things I noticed in the announcement was the repeated calls for “help us improve App Engine”. I think that’s a wise move and it looks to me that they’re attempting to reach out to the developer community to help shape the service. Maybe they think by allowing 10k developers to hack at and feel like they can contribute to the development that they’ll strike a Twitter or Jaiku on the platform.

This is a wait-and-see for me, the announcement wasn’t as big as I thought it’d be – but it’s got me interested.