Leveraging Shared Context to Facilitate Opportunistic Communication

Current online communication systems have neglected an important property of natural conversations; that is, many conversations are opportunistic and arise from awareness of a shared context. As a result, users of current online chat systems, for example, have to explicitly log in to predefined chat rooms with a strong goal in mind. Chatting is construed as a separate activity, and as such is supported by separate tools. Contrary to this, we believe effective communication tools should be embedded in software that supports everyday activities. Our system, I2I, helps people establish live chat while they are manipulating similar documents (e.g., they are reading the same or similar Web pages in their browser, or they are manipulating similar texts in their word processor) by embedding chat facilities in other applications. I2I makes the shared context of distributed users visible by grouping them together in a single conceptual space, thus providing them an opportunity to communicate within the context of the activities they were performing in the original application.