This past week saw a couple of interesting developments from Google.

Early in the week they joined the ranks of OpenID providers, making it possible for the squillions of Gmail users to use their account to authenticate at sites that support OpenID. At this stage its location appears something of a secret… although this is sure to change. It’s easy: just enter http://openid-provider.appspot.com/your_name_here as your OpenID.

It seems to me there’s huge potential here in education. Initially I’d been somewhat skeptical about OpenID, or at least hesitant; it appeared like a lot of hoo-har to set up our organisation to manage a server for this purpose, and even more hassle to use an external provider. If our setup can switch, however, to using Google Apps for Education, it seems like a complete no-brainer to take advantage of this new development.

Google’s release of their App Engine is an interesting development, most notably in that they’re suggesting that developers migrate to even use their development & deployment technologies (like Bigtable and the Google File System). This moves the product significantly off on a tangent away from other "cloud" solutions like Rackspace’s Mosso facility, where you bring your own software but deploy on their cloud. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop. The Rails devs at TechCrunch have had a go at rolling an initial application… and it looks promising so far. Heck - with the ability to deploy onto Google’s vast array of servers, the sort of issues that Dann and I have had with various hosting providers might make it worth getting into Python. Still, it’s certainly not yet a solution for those with a significant codebase in PHP/Ruby/etc…