In 10 years, EC2 will be the best way to run any kind of application on it.

In 10 years, AppEngine will be a dev platform especially useful for applications tied into the Google Stack.

EC2 is not inherently scalable, only after plugging in services like RightScale can anyone hope to have a reliable, redundant and scalable version of their app up on AWS. Google reduces that need by tethering all of their services together.

Also, they don’t tie the apps built on their platform directly into Google’s API’s and tool sets – they’re options that you can use but you can also choose to have your app running on your own domain with no linking to any Google services at all.

Also, Python is the “first” language they’re going to support – not the “only” language. They’ll be launching more languages soon, so I’m sitting tight until PHP is up there. But I have been playing with my beta account and it’s pretty cool for such an early stage product.

And I think the real goal here isn’t to compete with Facebook, but rather become to the web what Microsoft was to PC’s — the platform that all software is built upon. While Microsoft did that so they could sell more software, Google wants to do it to sell more ads. An ancillary benefit is that it’ll probably make it dramatically easier to identify and integrate acquisition candidates – GoogleFund? haha.

But I think that the comparison to Facebook is still interesting and will definitely be interesting to see how these apps tie into OpenSocial and OpenSocial partners networks. Because as of now, Google doesn’t really have any viral marketing mechanisms built in the way Facebook did.

-Wayne