Minor interface tweak: The default Wave avatar for new users (and bots) has been slightly updated with a bit of shading around the edges. Not a very big deal at all. Just interesting to see what things the team are tweaking.

Status

The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.

To cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:

Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.

An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.

[Read the article at The Next Web for more]

Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.

Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The APIs though, will provide developers with the ability to do it in the future…

The rest of the items on Glick’s list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I’ve included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don’t have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.