another Campfire One :-)

Update: the video and more information can be reached from the apps developer blog.


When about a year and a half ago the first "labs" services for Google Apps appeared, the blog post mentioned that

We also intend to eventually open up this platform to all App Engine developers, so that new and existing software vendors can build easy-to-consume software for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today.

Since this announcement, is has been relatively silent around this topic. While Google has been occasionally rolling out features that provided a glimpse of things to come, the bigger integration story had never been told. Until tonight, that is.

The first article that I saw on Google News was from venturebeat.com, mentioning a Campfire One that has happened only hours ago:

The search giant just announced a new service called the Google Apps Marketplace.

As the name suggests, it’s an online store where third-party developers can sell their applications to the 25 million users of Google Apps.

The presentation was really exciting -- especially when different software companies took the stage and demonstrated how tightly integrated their applications with Google Apps were. Think of apps that are able to

• Use a Google Apps account for sharing login credentials via OpenID


• Securely access google data like docs or calendar via GData and OAuth


• Tie together Google Apps, Salesforce, and other web services seamlessly


• Tie into and display additional data within Gmail


• Be listed and installed from a central Apps Marketplace, where customers can discover
  great enterprise apps -- and developers monetize them.

It will be exciting to see if the creation of such a market place will do to the apps infrastructure what other apps marketplaces have done for example to the Android phone or the iPhone. Will we hear new success stories about small hobby developers who build insanely popular enterprise apps and become the next software business sensation? Time will tell.

Congratulations on the launch -- I'm looking forward to see what happens next!