Livemaps for collection awareness

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 siterelated 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. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.