At their developer event Google IO, Google took the opportunity to announce WebM, a new project for pushing a video codec for HTML 5 that everyone can agree on.

I’ve been a long-time supporter of HTML 5, and have been getting excited about its prospects for some time. However, the announcement of this codec makes me even more excited than before.

Finally, we have a codec that all of the major browser vendors will be supporting for HTML 5. Finally, developers need not dream of a utopia where they only need encode their video once, and have it work on all major browsers – with HTML 5 and WebM together, we can now have that dream as new builds of the browsers are released.

Wow, what a day yesterday was!

Google went all-out at their Google IO event, and went and changed all kinds of things.

Google Wave announcements, a new codec for the web supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera, and all kinds of other fancy bits and pieces.

On top of this, Twitter for iPhone made it into the app store, so I can load that up and have a bit of a play with that too.

Look out for posts over the next few days on all of these – there’s still Day 2 of Google IO to come, where I’m probably going to get extremely excited about Android announcements!