Clustering for opportunistic communication

Abstract

We describe ongoing work on I2I, a system aimed at fostering opportunistic communication among users viewing or manipulating content on the Web and in productivity applications. Unlike previous work in which the URLs of Web resources are used to group users visiting the same resource, we present a more general framework for clustering work contexts to group users together that accounts for dynamic content and distributional properties of Web accesses which can limit the utility URL based systems.In addition, we describe a method for scaffolding asynchronous communication in the context of an ongoing task that takes into account the ephemeral nature of the location of content on the Web. The techniques we describe also nicely cover local files in progress, in addition to publicly available Web content. We present the results of several evaluations that indicate systems that use the techniques we employ may be more useful than systems that are strictly URL based.

WWW in the Small

“…To our knowledge there are few systems supporting direct social navigation on the WWW. Probably the I2I system [12] is the most closely related to this approach; in fact, the system provides users with chat functionality integrated in a web browser which allows them to communicate directly. The authors call this kind of interaction "opportunistic communication" since people who are viewing or manipulating the same or related contents on the web may take advantage of communicating together.…”

“…The authors call this kind of interaction "opportunistic communication" since people who are viewing or manipulating the same or related contents on the web may take advantage of communicating together. Though this ability to make the interaction among people contextualized around the information they are navigating in is a feature we consider also for our system, we are more focused on the support of members of a communities navigating around the same local space: hence we emphasize less the opportunistic aspect of the communication as the authors in [12] intend. Rather, we want to consider how the exchange of knowledge may be facilitated among people who are already part of a community built around/building a local space, even if the level of participation of the various members may be different, and consequently also the amount of knowledge sharing among the different members has to be modulated accordingly (see, for example, [14] for similar considerations in the pervasive computing domain).…”

Studying the effect of similarity in online task-focused interactions

“…Livemaps (Cohen et al, 2002) let users see other web surfers, grouped by topic. I2I (Budzik et al, 2002) is similar to Livemaps in that it groups web users by topic, allowing them to leave "calling cards" when they are interested in a topic and making these cards visible to other users who are browsing related web pages. Our research can inform such system-building efforts, identifying factors they can use to increase their chances of success.…”

Analyzing the social capital value chain in community network interfaces

“…To implement social translucence, minimalist visualizations called social proxies depict individual activity over time and in relation to the group, providing subtle cues that convey context for activities such as participating in an auction or lecture and waiting in line . Another direction seeks to prompt opportunistic interaction of web site browsers by depicting a dynamic, lexical representation of their work context (gleaned by other processing activities) and intelligently suggesting others with common situations (Budzik et al, 2002).…”