Google Wave: Extensions

So we’ve played around in wave a few weeks, while its fun and crazy at the same time when all your contacts are online at the same time. So until we all get a wave account, what else can we do?

Have you had a look at Wave Extensions? A Wave extension is a robot or a gadget. The robots are applications that interact with wave participants (based on their capabilities), as well as automating tasks, like publishing a wave post to a blog. Gadgets is a small application that runs with in a wave, like sudoku. It only responds to what each user does with the gadget. It can’t add users etc like a robot can.

Lets take a look at the current extensions list. To view the full list, you will need to be signed in with your google account, you do not have to have wave to see it.

While there are several useful robots/gadgets already available for example under the integration tool, you can add twitbot, to integrate your twitter account into wave, or the rssybot to bring in your RSS threads. Then we have the amazonbot that allows you to shop via wave, the bloggy and posterous bots that will post to your blog and taggy that recognizes hashtags.

To use a robot, just add the address to your contacts and add the bot to your wave. When you are in a wave, start a new blip, click on the green puzzle icon and enter the url, this will post the gadget into your wave.

Looking through the list, which I’m sure will be updated daily, you will find many funny, smart  and useless bots and gadgets.  As with any online platform, wave can easily become a central integrated ‘station’ to do all things web, especially communication. While it is still in the infant stage, I have no doubt it will soon be used across households everywhere, significantly changing they way we communicate.