We were today at Google's Developer Day held at the San Jose Convention Centre and attended by over 1,000 developers. There were 9 other such Developer Days around the world, in Americas (North and South), Asia, Australia and Europe, which attracted over 5,000 people worldwide! But back in California, we sat with co-founder Sergey, product manager Sundar Pichai and Bret Taylor, the head of Google's developer program as well as media colleagues from USA Today, InternetWeek and the charming Elinor Mills from Cnet, for an impromptu round table, just after Google's vice-president of engineering, Jeff Huber's keynote.

On the question of "why giving all these tools for free and let developers build mashups/applications on the back of Google", the response from Taylor was... well... very Googuelesque:

"By leveraging this creativity we have this much richer ecosystem of features and products built around the data on our servers which makes the experience better and gets more users to our products [...] For example our homepage, iGoogle, that is litterally made of content and services that are created by people that don't work at Google... 90% anyway. Our homepage success rests on the shoulders of these developers that don't work here. It's a virtuous circle."

To which, Jeff Huber added,

"We have an anti-portal approach and we are confident that people are going to come to us because it's a great experience and we are more than happy to send them off to do things on the web because the web is the killer app. We got a model, when the Web succeed, we will succeed.

And on the monetisation of this developer community,

"The APIs are free to use. And because more people are using it, that makes the Web more useful. The only thing that we ask is if you are using the APIs in a high volume way, that we prefer you to use our monetisation platform Google Ads [...] But in a building block model, in the kind of mashed up architecture, it's very easy to use AdSense as your business model", commented Jeff Huber.

"It turns out that for our first API, the Google Map API, it was completely free and we didn't make any comment about AdSense and I was going through all the Map API sites and every single one was using AdSense. It just turns out that AdSense is probably the easiest way of monetising your site, really really quickly. And so it became so effective independently of our developers' products", added Bret Taylor