Today and tomorrow, Google is hosting the Google I/O Developer Conference. There's a lot of talk about fancy computer stuff that I can't even begin to pretend to understand at these things, but they also make announcements about upcoming changes to Google and breakthroughs that could eventually have some sort of an impact on the internet. (Web-savvy people should avert their eyes from this post; I'm probably going to inadvertently make mincemeat out of some sacred web-nerd cows here.)

One of the announcements today was that Google Wave, which some people swear is a great collaboration tool but which I have never been able to find much of a use for, is now open to the public and invite-free. You can read Google's own account of what they announced at I/O today, but I think the most important paragraph for non-development web users is right here:

There are already lots of great apps out on the web, but there hasn’t been one destination where you could easily find them. Our new Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace for web apps that helps people find the best web applications across the Internet and allows developers to reach new users. We also joined other web companies in announcing WebM, an open web media format project and open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec, that we are contributing to the project under a royalty-free license.

Everybody's going app crazy. The WebM news, as explained by PC World, could speed up the adoption of HTML5 on the internet, which could, ultimately mean the demise of Flash's dominance. Maybe tomorrow, there'll be some news on that rumored Google Tablet and/or Google's upcoming e-bookstore.