Google's App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not Amazon

There's no shortage of stories about Google’s newly launched App Engine, but almost all of them get it wrong -- because they compare the new service to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services.
If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.