As I’m writing this on my notebook, I’m intermittently checking e-mail, answering instant messages, tweeting, and sending Facebook updates. That’s a lot of windows: Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take care of all these things within one easy-to-use application?

Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers behind Google Maps, thought so too–and the powers that be (a.k.a. Sergey Brin) at Google believed in the concept enough to give them a team in Australia to develop it over the last two years.

Today, at the Google IO developers conference, the Rasmussen brothers and lead product manager Stephanie Hannon previewed the results of their labors: a browser-based communication and collaboration platform called Wave.

It took them a good 90 minutes (the entire day-two keynote) to show off Wave’s many capabilities, but at its most basic level, it’s a cross between e-mail and instant messaging client. If the person you’re communicating with is online, the communication becomes a two-way IM chat; if not, your message is waiting for them when they log on.

One panel of the paned interface shows every conversation–live or latent, Google calls them waves–much the way most e-mail inboxes look. Another pane shows the actual messages in the wave. Here’s a screenshot I grabbed from the Wave preview site:

The IM functionality has a very neat aspect that alone sold me on the concept: As you type, each character is sent in real time, so that I can even “interrupt” you by typing back before you complete your sentence. I also liked Wave’s ability to let you admit third parties to your conversation–and a playback feature that lets them see the messages they missed.

But wait, there’s more. Waves can include images, videos, even maps–making Wave a document creation tool, too. And multiple users can edit waves in real time, with tracking a la Word revision mode–powerful collaboration features.

Because Wave is browser-based, you can use it from in Web-enabled phone (there was a brief demo of this). And because Google is open-sourcing what Lars Rasmussen described as “the lion’s share” of Wave code as well as its protocols, developers are free to create their own Wave clients and servers that can still communicate with other Wave clients and servers (much the way e-mail works).

All this makes Wave a candidate for all sorts of uses, including forums, wikis, bug-track systems (Google I/O is a developer conference, remember) and anything that you might now be managing via, say, Yahoo Groups.

Of course, e-mail and traditional IM systems aren’t going away anytime soon. But because Wave’s protocols are open source, developers could (in theory) create gateways between these systems (not to mention Twitter and Facebook) and Wave so that early adopters could use Wave for all their communication needs. (That’s a big if, obviously.)

The Wave demo earned a standing ovation from the developers at this morning’s keynote. Sadly, however, Wave is still at least a few months away from even a beta public release: Right now, all you can do is sign up to be notified when it’s ready.

In the meantime, you can read Lars Rasmussen’s post about Wave on the Google blog, or if time is no object, watch video of the keynote.

With Google CEO Eric Schmidt as emcee, several Google execs showed off a variety of cool technologies, based on the upcoming fifth version of HTML that will make browsers more powerful than ever as application platforms. These include new markup tags such as <canvas> and <video> that will provide native support for, respectively, 2D drawing and running videos in browser–tasks which today typically involve installing plug-ins such as Flash or Shockwave. As guest speaker Jay Sullivan, a vice president at Mozilla, put it, HTML 5 will get “things like video out of plug-in prison.”

Also coming: new APIs for other features such as offline storage of data (so that you can use Web apps even when you’re not online), 3D graphics (think first-person-shooter in a browser) and geolocation (Google demo’d a new “My Location” button on Google Maps that you can opt to share with others — hmm, will this supercede Zhiing?).

An Android guy (Romain Guy, to be precise) talked about how the next version (code named Donut) will include a neat open-source text-to-speech engine and multiple language packs. Used with a translation app, this could basically turn your phone into a neat portable translator for supported languages.

You can read Google’s official Google I/O keynote press release to see what they thought was important (but remember, it’s for developers).

As for news you can use right now, head on over to Google’s Web Elements page, which has an assortment of neat code snippets that make it super easy to instantly add modules for Google search, chat, YouTube video, maps and more to your Web site.

You can add this Google Custom Search web element by pasting a few lines of code onto your site.

The best part of the keynote, though, was the end, when Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra announced that all attendees would be receiving free Android phones – and SIM cards for 30 free days of unlimited voice and data use. I’m looking forward to some quality time with Android.