Google Wave Gadgets
With the introduction of Google Wave you are sure to be hearing a lot about gadgets for Wave.
Almost any iGoogle gadget can run within Wave and take advantage of the Wave capabilities. So, the gadgets you now use on your iGoogle home page, will also be usable in your Wave account.
Gadgets are built on Google’s OpenSocial Platform. A gadget is one type of extension. Robots are another type but we will not discuss them right now. Some non wave gadgets can be used in Google Wave but it will not be able to take advantage of the live wave environment.
Google Wave provides and open source API so anyone can write a gadget for the Wave that will be aware of the multi user environment and take advantage of the playback capability of Google Wave. One unique feature of Google Gadgets is that a gadget inside a specific wave belongs to everyone that is in that wave and not a specific user.
Creating Google Wave Gadgets:
Once Wave is open to the public, expect gadget development to take off like wild fire.
There is potential for any number of useful gadgets to be written.
One of those that are available now is the Google map gadget. If you are planning an event, using the Google map is a valuable tool to let everyone know where the event will be held.
The take-a-poll gadget is useful for determining who votes for which agenda items, which lunch items etc.
There is a also a Twitter gadget that can integrate Twitter and the wave that it is being used in.
Writing a gadget involves writing an XML file that you upload via Google Wave itself. The opensouce API for writing a gadget as well as instructions can be found at:
http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/fundamentals.html#Content_Type
Here are some photos of the yes-no-maybe polling gadget, the chess gadget and the maps gadget.
More gadgets can be found at http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/.
