Designing A Social Portal

The Information Ecology project at DSTC is an interdisciplinary programme investigating how to improve the interconnectedness of the online experience. One of our goals is to enable software to better exploit the broad context (both within the computing environment and beyond it) of the execution of a user command. We intend to investigate ways in which software can appear more integrated with it environment by exploiting context more effectively. Several kinds of context are initially appealing and this paper describes initial work in studying one kind: the patterns in people’s social interaction with each other. The complexity of studying human interaction is great enough to have spawned several entire academic disciplines[1], so we have attempted to narrow our scope. We are interested specifically in what can be done with information about the people with whom our user communicates electronically. Our initial approach is to gather that information by providing an application which supports communication with a list of contacts and use that as a way to capture information. Based on this data we want to answer several research questions that are outlined in Section 7. For this to be useful as a research tool, we need an application which people will use for a significant proportion of their communication, therefore: