Dave Elkins

One of the big pushes that social networks have had in the past couple years is the ability to extend them and build on top of the platform.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and OpenSocial all have ways to provide “Apps” for extending the platform.  Google Wave is no different, it has several ways for developers to extend and enhance waves.

The primary methods of extending and enhancing waves are Robots and Gadgets.

Robots

Robots are participants in the wave just like any of the people who are in a wave.  They can add blips, modify the blips and interact with external systems.

One example is Bloggy, this Robot publishes the content of a wave to a Blogspot blog.  Other examples are Stocky which looks for a $ followed by a stock symbol (like $GOOG) and replace the text with the current stock price or Hobbity which shortens URLs within a blip.

Currently, robots can be implemented in Java or Python and have to be hosted on the Google AppEngine.  I would guess that is only temporary and that a robot in the future will be able to be hosted anywhere and implemented in any language as long as it follows the Wave protocol guidelines.

Gadgets

Gadgets are inserted in to a blip (an entry within a wave) to give the blip more functionality.  For example, you could add a Google Map, or Gadget to view Facebook status updates, etc.

Gadgets are like iGoogle or OpenSocial gadgets with some additional api calls that are specific to Google Wave.  A gadget is basically Javascript+HTML so they are very easy to build.

Embed API

The Embed API allows you to put a wave on to any web page so that a Wave can live outside Google Wave.  It is pretty straightforward to do it is just a matter of copying and pasting some JavaScript.  Right now it is hackish to do because you have to look up the Wave Id using the Debug menu item but I would expect in the future that it will become easier to do in the future.

Embeddy is a Robot that makes it much easier to generate the JavaScript code for embedding a Wave outside of Google Wave.

In future posts, we will go through how to create our own Robots, Gadgets and what we can accomplish with the Embed API.