Geeks in heaven at Google I/O

Everyone's favorite search engine wrapped up its Google I/O developers' conference Thursday, and what a show it was. Over the two days of the conference, new tools were unveiled, new services were launched, and enough Google Kool-Aid was served to drown an army of slathering hackers. To get the full feeling of the event, however, you had to drop in on the after-hours event Wednesday night. There, bolstered by a

Everyone's favorite search engine wrapped up its Google I/O developers' conference Thursday, and what a show it was. During the two days of the conference, new tools were unveiled, new services were launched, and enough Google Kool-Aid was served to drown an army of slathering hackers.

To get the full feeling of the event, however, you had to drop in on the after-hours event Wednesday night. There, bolstered by a live DJ and a performance by Flight of the Conchords, the mood was energized, exuberant, and -- dare I say it? -- decidedly dot-com.

As a fellow conference-goer observed, young, white males outnumbered any other demographic by ten to one, but these were hardly the ordinary bunch. Where else could you go to see so many twentysomethings, sitting mere feet away from an endless supply of free draft beer, contentedly sipping cans of soda?

And soda there certainly was, as throughout the show, attendees helped themselves to cans from several refrigerators on the second-floor meeting area, in a kind of tribute to the legendary largesse of the Google campus. In fact, the whole event seemed designed to conjure what it must be like to land a young geek's dream job at Google.

Rubik's Cubes and Lego blocks were scattered around the after-hours lounge area: toys for eggheads to fiddle with in contemplative moments. There were pool tables. There were foosball tables. There was Wii Bowling. Attendees took to them gleefully -- and why not? Most of them were still in school the last time Internet companies were throwing this kind of party.

Notably absent, on the other hand, were the usual suspects. IBM gave no keynote address. There was no one from Microsoft present to extol the virtues of .Net, no discussion of cutting-edge Java APIs, and scarcely a mention of the word "enterprise."

Instead, there was only Google: Google and its free services, Google and its open source tools, Google and its appealingly optimistic belief in the Web as the leading platform for modern computing. Conference sessions had an air of affable nonchalance, as if to say, "Who knows what we'll be able to do with this stuff? But it's pretty cool, right?"

Google I/O was a conference by and for hackers -- for the kind of people who automatically hit "View Source" whenever they see something cool on the Web, who stay up all night writing code just to see if it will work, and for whom the word "beta" is not a warning but an invitation.

If this all sounds familiar, it should. The difference is that, ten years ago, the exuberance of the dot-com boom was already giving way to the nagging dread that the piper would soon be calling, and someone would have to pony up.

But of course, nobody worries about money at Google. And when you're under Google's roof, you need want for nothing, either. It was as if, for two days, Google had created a kind of developers' Disneyland, where coders from all industries and backgrounds could put aside any questions of user requirements, release schedules, or profitability, and simply bask in the dream of spending their days building Really Cool Stuff. A Google kind of dream.

I can only wonder: Were such dreams meant to last?