One of the neatest features in the discontinued-but-alive Google Wave was its collection of gadgets and extensions. Many of those gadgets live on in Google's new Shared Spaces, where you can invite others to contribute, vote and collaborate on the web.

You may or may not continue using Wave as an open-source "box", but if you want to archive any important conversations you've had in it, you can now export a Wave into HTML or ZIP files, attachments included.

Google has announced that despite Wave's demise as a Google App, its open source code will continue to be developed into a fully functional application available to anyone with the desire to host it.

Yesterday while I was on the air with Jeff and Leo recording TWiG, Google announced that they are halting development on Wave. The web app will be available till the end of the year — with mechanisms to export your current wave data — and the code will remain open source.

Sad news on the Google wire today, at least for fans of the next new thing. Google announced, in a post filled with examples of Wave's innovations and strengths, that the real-time messaging and collaboration tool hasn't seen "the user adoption we would have liked".

Google Wave now lets anyone with a Google account to jump in and see what the early adopters have been squawking (and snarking) about. Head to wave.google.com now to get Waving, but read on for some beginner tips and use cases.

Google Wave now gives bloggers, corporate intranets and other potential Wave users a way to let the public watch what's going on in a Wave and, for the truly daring, invite any Wave user to edit.

Google Wave has added the ability to remove participants from any wave. It's a somewhat complex feature (you wouldn't want someone to be able to, say, delete your email or shared documents), but Google came up with an elegant solution.

As excited as some of us still are about Google Wave (hell, two of us wrote a book), Wave's biggest problem remains: "What would I use it for?" With the app's new wave templates, Google wants to guide you toward answers.

For Google Wave users, email notifications make it easy to track waves you're interested in, but what if you want to publish them more broadly with others? nowWw lets you share waves on Facebook and Twitter, sharing them with a wider audience.

I'm thrilled to announce that the online book by Adam Pash and myself, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now in print! Order your copy here.

One of Google Wave's more powerful features is its extensions — small gadgets and doodads you can embed or include in waves to add great functionality. They used to be particularly difficult to hunt down and install, but no more.

If you like Google Wave's real-time collaboration but not the interface or registration, check out TypeWith.me. It's a solid, simple, as-you-type document collaboration web app with no sign-up required.

Google just turned on email notifications in Wave. That's great news if you've gotten your hands on an invite but haven't kept up with the going-ons inside — easy to do when you're not in the habit of visiting the site.

Besides a killer algorithm and brand-name recognition, Google's greatest strength is its speed at releasing new products. We get to play with new, cool and ever-improving tools for free. Recently, though, we've seen that being unwitting lab subjects can kind of stink.

A week ago we asked readers to tell us how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, we got lots of interesting responses.

Once you're active in Google Wave, you want to know when something new happens there - even if you don't have Wave open in your browser. These notifier tools monitor your Wave inbox, letting you know you've got new and changed waves.

Google Wave may be in invite-only preview and still lack important features, but early adopters ARE using it — and we want to hear about it. Tell us about how you use Wave on a day-to-day basis, and your use case just might get included in The Complete Guide to Google Wave, the first book about Wave.

One of the most-needed missing features in the Google Wave preview rolls out this week: user access permissions. Now, rather than everyone being able to edit everyone else's blips in a total free-for-all, the creator of a wave can add users and groups and give them either full access to edit everything or read-only access. The binary choice is still too limiting, but GOOG says that "Reply only" access is on its way.