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.

Google Wave is a next generation communication environment that is an attempt to reinvent email, IM, and collaboration on the web in general.  There are many companies trying to do this Twitter and Facebook to name a few.  Google Wave is the first attempt to make something that will be open and not a walled garden like Facebook or Twitter (at least that is what Google is saying too early to see what really happens).

Google says that they will be open sourcing all the code so anyone can setup their own Wave server and that the servers will be able to communicate with each other similar to how email servers communicate.

So just like today how someone with Yahoo Email account can send and receive emails with someone with a Google Email account, the intention is that someone with a Wave Account with Provider A should be able to communicate seamlessly with someone with a Wave Account with Provider B.

It is very early but it looks really exciting and has a lot of promise.

There are more post to come that will break down how Google Wave works, how to use and how to develop for it.

Stay tune.