Diving into Google Wave

Guardian developers Lisa van Gelder and Martyn Inglis employed one of our new research techniques to uncover the meaning of Google Wave in the context of news.

Lisa wrote a detailed overview of Wave for the Technology blog. She talks about what it does, why it's interesting, and what's wrong with it.

At the core of Wave is an attempt to improve the usability of email - not just by writing a new email client, but by creating a new protocol. Their stated aim is that "waves may succeed email as the dominant form of Internet communication".

Martyn then explained how our DevLab projects work and why we do them in a post on the Open Platform blog.

The DevLab process is basically a simple one. A proposal is made to the departmental management team, in this case what is a Google Wave and how, if at all, is it relevant for us as a company. Once approved the developers are taken completely out of the standard development process for five days.

This period is to be spent on investigation. There is no requirement for a working product that can be released or even demoed. Rather the outcome is understanding, and for this understanding to be spread throughout the team.

Finally, he shared some detailed thoughts on what Google Wave might mean to a news organization like the Guardian.

The extensibility of Wave provides other areas where Guardian content may be delivered. Robots that respond to posts could drag in relevant articles via the Open Platform. There could be a PubSubHubbub model where Waves periodically request the latest news and provide a discussion tool around these.

It is possible to imagine such a talkboard style forum in existence, perhaps with a local focus, latest headlines, user generated photographs and maps, comments, longer blog style posts and so on, creating a rich community platform.

Also, Chris Thorpe did a bit of hacking with Google Wave not long ago. He explains what he discovered and how he built his hack while at the Google campus in a Google Wave preview for developers.

And if you want to know more about DevLabs, you can find the thinking behind and the rules for DevLabs in a presentation we shared at BarCamp Brighton 3.

It's proving to be a very effective way of getting us all thinking about tools that we didn't know we needed to know about.