Google IO Keynote

So Matt and I are both at Google IO (Google's developer conference) today and tomorrow and are both going to be live blogging the event. Matt is quicker at getting his content up but I've got a video camera...

On a related note, I used Apple iMovie for the first time today. It has got automatic upload to YouTube, a very useful feature. I expect that it is using the YouTube API, one of the Google APIs that is being discussed today.

The keynote is being chaired by Vic Gundotra, Google's Vice President of Engineering. Arrington had a preview of the main announcements last night.

Gundotra began with the words "What does Google have to do with developers?" The answer is that Google wants to make the internet better for developers. The internet is Google's ecosystem (I thought he said 'geekosystem' but I must have misheard him) and making the internet better is good for Google. Making the internet better will allow developers to write better web applications. Better web applications attracts more users onto the internet. More users on the internet means more Google searches, which in turn means more advertising revenue for Google. Simple. Next question.

The most exciting part of the key note for me was the demonstration of Android. I apologise for the camera shake but the demo is well worth seeing. Look out for the integration of Google Street View with the on-phone compass (towards the end of the video).

Other announcements were the release of the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit (see post) and the general availability of the AppEngine. Pricing for the AppEngine was also announced. It will remain free to use for the first 500MB of storage and the first 5 million pages views.