If you haven’t yet heard of Google Wave…you may need to peek out of the tech cave and have a look around!

Google Wave has been billed as an “email killer” and as such, has some pretty huge shoes to fill.

Developers interested in the phenomenon of Google Wave have started to add increased functionality to Wave in the form of “Wave Gadgets” (“Gadget” is Google for “widget”)

I thought it would be interesting to write about them in the early stages of Wave development and then re-visit this topic later on to see the progress.

Here are some of the first Google Wave Gadgets: (from the gallery)

Emoticony
Lee Stone – Sep 20, 2009

Emoticony is a robot for Google Wave which replaces text representations of emoticons with the relevant image. There are currently over 50 different emoticons available, with this number continuing to grow. Look out for themed emoticons focused around specific events (Halloween, Christmas etc.) More details can be found at: http://emoticony.leestone.co.uk

Map Gadget
Pamela Fox – Oct 23, 2009

Lets users edit a map together, adding markers and polys with titles and descriptions. Users can also search for addresses and businesses and add those.

Check out a video tutorial of the Map Gadget on Youtube.

Craigslist Searchy
Vincent Etter – Oct 21, 2009

Craigslist Searchy is a Google Wave robot that monitors results of a given search on Craigslist. It simply takes the URL of the results page of a search on Craigslist, and adds each result item (with its title, date, text, and pictures) to the wave, in a separate blip. The bot includes code to update the Wave when new results are found, but it is not yet functioning due to API issues.

IMDbotty
Vincent Etter – Oct 19, 2009

IMDbotty replaces links to movies on IMDb with a small gadget that displays useful information about the movie (title, year, rating, cover, director(s), actors).

Likey
Ben Griffiths – Oct 17, 2009

A simple like/dislike gadget that can be added to a blip for intuitive user rating. It tells you how many people have liked, how many have disliked, and what you selected. You can also change your selection.

Map Cluster Gadget
Pamela Fox – Oct 15, 2009

Lets each participant locate themselves on the map, and clusters all the locations.

Here is a huge list of more Google Wave Gadgets on DocStoc.
If, after viewing all the cool possibilities for Google Wave, you are interested in creating your own Wave Gadgets, here is a good place to start.
Wave Extension Design Principles

I can’t wait to see what else is in store for Google Wave. Stay tuned!