People, Places, and Things: The Next Generation Web

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| James Gwertzman        | Margo Seltzer           |
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| Microsoft Corporation  | Harvard University      |
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| JamesGw@microsoft.com  | margo@eecs.harvard.edu  |
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World-Wide Web is Antisocial

o Great for things

Pictures, text, audio clips, movies

o Not a true place

Browsing most sites offline is identical to browsing them online.

o No people in evidence

(Figure)

We Need a Social Web

o Current model is a giant Coffee table book ...

Lots of cool stuff, but you are all alone when you view it

o Right model is a museum or classroom

Lots of cool stuff, and you're surrounded by people while viewing it

o Interact with people as you browse

We Need People

o A Person is uniquely identified

o A Person has attributes

some attributes never change
some attributes change frequently

We Need Places

o A Place contains both People and Things

o A Place has attributes

What People and Things are in the Place?
Ambiance
- Look like?
- Sound like?
- Feel like?

Getting Technical

o We need some infrastructure

We need real-time Person to (IP, username) directory service.
We need multicast (IRC?)
We need authentication (public keys?)

Getting Technical (cont)

o We need to enhance web browsers and servers

Add real-time state to sets of Web pages
Browsers need to provide interaction with the people in a place
Every user needs a personal server for personal attributes

Prototype

(Figure)

Authentication

o Solves certain problems:

Is this person really Jon?
Only my friends can learn my current location.

o Turn it off to be anonymous

Planned Uses

o Classroom office hours

Convenient for students and professors

o Building online communities

Web pages are ideal ways to find people with similar interests
Imagine the X-Files site at 10;00 each Friday

o Makes web more attractive to beginners

Other Online Communities

o WorldsAway, MUD's, Habitat, The Palace, etc. o Pros:

Designed for social interaction
Greater sense of immersion

o Cons:

Closed encironments
Can't interact with existing Web content

Future Research

o Apply architecture theory to place design

Possible to make online spaces where users want to hang out?
Learn from new urbanism movement, famous city streets
Web as replacement for declining number of public spaces?

o Community in VRML?

Track progress of "avatar" proposals for VRML
Build geographic filters (whisper, talk, shout)

o What is ideal user interface?

Must seemlessly integrate people, places, and things