The Google IO conference began today, and several announcements were made this morning.

• Google has open-sourced VP8 video codec and rolled it into a projected called WebM. This change will help browsers finally standardize on an open video format to replace Flash video on the web.
• Google Wave is now available to everyone, including Google Apps users. Remember Google Wave? Our latest thinking is that it pretty much sucks. Hopefully opening it up to everyone will give them enough feedback to make it useful.
• Google Chrome Web Store is a place for marketing and obtaining standards-based web applications. Now there is a centralized location to access some cutting-edge web apps that show off the new and excited features of modern web standards.

It’s clear that Google is fully behind an open web. Google promised more announcements for tomorrow’s keynote, beginning at 8:30am PDT, which will be streamed at youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers. Tune in!

Unless you don’t pay any attention to the tech press, you’ve been hearing a lot recently about Google Wave. Even if you’re one of the lucky 100,000 with an invite – or one of the eight more users that each of those got to invite to the private beta – you’re probably wondering what Google Wave is. It’s essentially a merging of email, instant messaging and document collaboration – Gmail, Google Talk and Google Docs – all rolled together in a linear interface.

We’ve been playing with it – one of the first 100,00 – for the last week or two and can say it looks quite promising. The service is fairly useless in a kind of lonely way if you don’t have other users with whom to collaborate. Imagine being the only user you know who has email. That’s Wave until they start to allow more users.

We’ll have more information about Wave once it’s more widely available. Until then, we’re not going to say more and add ourselves the list of those who have tried to explain Wave and failed, but here’s the best video we’ve seen on the subject.

Click here to view the embedded video.