Livemaps for collection awareness

Abstract

With the increasing proliferation of chat applications on the web, the old vision of "adding people" to the web is becoming a reality. Along with collaboration tools, more and more sites offer people awareness mechanisms to let the site visitors know about each other. This reflects the dual nature of the web as a place for virtual meetings as well as an information repository. While standalone chat tools became the killer application of the Internet, site-related awareness applications did not quite catch on. In this work, we suggest possible reasons for this phenomenon and propose a new paradigm for awareness and social navigation. We identify three main obstacles to the existing site-related awareness applications: high sensitivity to the "critical mass" requirement. inflexible meeting place granularity and poor visitor visibility. To address these issues, we extend the well-known "document awareness" concept to a more general one that we call "collection awareness", which better reflects the graph structure of the web. We introduce a new tool for high-level awareness and collaboration, called Livemaps, which projects live information onto a web site map. We demonstrate how Livemaps addresses the obstacles we pointed out and describe a user study conducted on a "fan" web site for the "Friends" comedy series, so as to verify whether Livemaps actually improves social awareness.