Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to asynchronously fetch the text at any URL.

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up being long enough to be its own article.

There are 50 million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will 'Checkmate' Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocial is awesome and Facebook is dead. MySpace joins Google on OpenSocial initiative. OK, surely that settles it, Facebook is toast. Nope, not in my opinion.

Imho, Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series. Only in tech, a persistently immature industry, could such an idea be aired seriously (assuming Mike is actually serious). I hope that the Facebook people, many of whom have never been in the middle of a tech PR war, don't overreact. Me, I've been around this block so many times and it's boring. Let's see some software then I'll let you know if this means anything. But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no 'there' there.

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10.2 billion.

Does the arrival of 'Google Apps for your Domain' sound the death-knell for Redmond's world domination? That is the question sweeping the industry this week as the owner of the world's most-used search engine released a set of hosted applications 'for organizations that want to provide high-quality communications tools to their users without the hassle of installing and maintaining software or hardware.'

What comes after Google? Where will the Web, the Internet, the whole nexus of telecommunications, i-Technology, and the quest for a better world, take us?

Like so many of the ideas that tumble out of the Googleplex into the public domain, Google Trends is irresistible. Jeremy Geelan puts the application, newly taken out of beta and now available to all cyberspace from the Google main page, through its paces by taking it out for a giddy spin around the i-Technology world. The results are surprising...