Google App is open, but not quite…as it just took one day for issues to appear, and Google had to close its HuddleChat: “We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we’ve decided to take it down.”

What really happened and Google failed to mention was that the HuddleChat was strikingly similar to Campfire real-time chat developed by 37Signals LLC.

No words from Google on that, but Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, told ReadWriteWeb blog: “We’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we’re just disappointed that they stopped so low to basically copy it feature by feature, layout by layout.”

After talks on Campfire and HuddleChat began to emerge, Pete Koomen, product manager, Google App Engine Team posted a comment on the same blog, saying: “A couple of colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work with their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick.”

He also added that following some complaints from the developer community, “rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.”

Google announced on Monday the release of Google App Engine, which allows outside developers to build and run their applications on top of Google’s infrastructure, making it easier for them to focus on the applications, rather than on system administration and maintenance.

For the time being, Google App Engine is only be available to a maximum of 10,000 sign ups, the company said, giving each developer a restriction to the free quota of 500MB of storage and the necessary CPU and network bandwidth to sustain approximately 5 million page views per month for a typical app.

Google App Engine gives access to the same building block Google uses for its own applications, offering dynamic webserving with full support of common web technologies, persistent storage with Bigtable and GFS, automatic scaling and load balancing, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email and fully featured local development environment.