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Publication
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud.
Paper
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.