WWWScope

Judging by the reaction to last week’s release of Elastic Computing by Amazon one might think they had done something that will redefine computing as we know it. In fact, it looks more like they have built a nice provisioning model around VPS hosting. Solving operational issues is worth noting of course, but I think the noise around Elastic Computing overshadowed a far more important release: the GData for Google Base API.

I believe that - while Elastic Computing is very cool - the impact of the GData/Google Base release will be greater in the medium to long term.

GData/Base gives developers an easy way to store and query structured data, in a way that is suitable for mash-up application development. The low barriers to entry, the lack of fees on data storage and Google’s reputation for high availability will encourage many developers to use Google Base as a substitute for a general purpose database. Once that data is in there it’s available to other developers to use. I’m predicting that the availability of that data will create an explosion of creative uses in the same way FlickR, Del.icio.us and Google Maps created ecosystems of applications around them which were unimaginable before those APIs were available.

Google has learnt the lesson from those applications well: a good API, plus a good dataset makes a very successful product.

At the moment, Google still doesn’t have a “killer app” built on GData/Base. For me, the possibility of intergration of data feeds from Base with Google Spreadsheets is an application feature that intrigues me. Discussion of that idea will have to wait for another post, though.