What Is A People Browser?

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What The Heck Is A People Browser?

Overview

A People Browser is a tool for managing presence on the Internet. This article discusses the history and evolution of the People Browser. For the complete text of Chief Technologist Jeff Bone's paper on People Browsers, download the Adobe Acrobat 3.0 (PDF) version -- "What the Heck is a People Browser Anyway?"

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In the late Eighties and early Nineties, various mechanisms existed for getting around the Internet and accomplishing tasks. You could transfer files with FTP, and then view and edit files downloaded via FTP through a variety of applications, each designed to handle a specific protocol. Custom front-ends were required to access different database systems.

In short, getting around the Internet was a colossal nightmare, the problems of network navigation and network resource discovery remaining unresolved.

The team at NCSA pushed the application of an old idea -- hypertext -- to solve those difficulties. They integrated the handling of various multimedia content types and created a basic mechanism for integrating external systems such as databases. The innovation of the Web thus lies not in particular features, but in the synthesis of variable features into a single, cross-platform, interoperable mechanism that solves numerous problems. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the same fashion, Activerse is solving the problems inherent in the multiple methods of direct communications on the Internet. Millions of people spend a significant part of each day online, and yet there are no standardized, cross-platform, Internet- or web-friendly mechanisms that allow people to find each other online or know their current status. There are a wealth of independent mechanisms that require users to explicitly manage details of addressing and setting up communications sessions - w, who, rwho, IRC, MUDs, finger, email, LDAP - but the fact remains that even when two people are online, they are constrained to interacting in an asynchronous fashion such as email or news, or must an out-of-band mechanism to find and to negotiate a synchronous interaction, like emailing someone to meet on a chat at a particular time.

The critical missing piece is a cross-platform, standardized, dynamic, and scalable system for exchanging presence information. With such a system in place, it becomes possible to integrate the ideas, if not the implementation of all these mechanisms, and the whole can be seen as larger than the sum of its parts. We call that solution a People Browser, and believe it represents a fundamentally new category of Internet software.

A People Browser lets a user know who on a personal list is online at any time and how they may be reached. Further information presented is user status, user-directory information, whether the user is busy and/or should not be disturbed, if they are available for synchronous communication, as well as some amount of information provided by a user about what they currently are doing. This collection of information, called 'presence' forms the basis of the People Browser. The availability of presence information allows a People Browser to automatically handle brokering and managing a wide variety of functionality and communication without putting strain upon the user. In many ways, the notion of presence and its associated implementation is the central metaphor of the People Browser, in the same way hypertext is the central metaphor of the Web.

With all of this, the People Browser can be regarded as an application platform than a point solution. By automating the process of knowing who is online at any given time and how to reach them, a People Browser can enable spontaneous, ad hoc interaction and collaboration via arbitrary communication tools. People Browsers are based on 'open standards', to promote innovation and technological progress as well as ensuring a vigorous and competitive marketplace that benefits business and the end-user. They should integrate with available products and use existing standards and mechanisms whenever possible. The creation of a standard protocol and system architecture is the key invention for People Browsers to succeed, just as HTML and HTTP were the key inventive concepts that drove the Web.

In addition, any system which relies on centralized servers for this is subject to problems in scalability, reliability, performance, and security. Also, a heavily server-centric solution is less likely to reach the levels of adoption necessary quickly enough. People Browsers should utilize a largely peer-to-peer system architecture, relying on servers only for initial introductions between clients and for managing certain processes when peers are offline.

The features and capabilities of a People Browser should be defined from the outset to encourage standardized use and development. In short, a People Browser:

  • let users know when their friends or colleagues are online
  • have a notion of availability; is a user busy, or available?
  • react to changes in user status or availability dynamically, in real time
  • let users selectively subscribe to others' presence information
  • let users selectively publish to others their own presence information
  • have a people-centric notion of addressability distinct from IP addresses
  • handle users that move between machines
  • handle users on machines with dynamic IP addressability
  • scale to encompass the entire Internet community
  • respect individual and organizational concerns of privacy
  • address concerns of security
  • integrate with arbitrary synchronous communications tools and modes
  • integrate with other asynchronous communications tools such as email
  • are based on open, available standards and APIs
  • interoperate with other People Browsers to form a global system
  • form a basic platform for launching interaction with other people online

People Browsers represent an application category that solves a fundamental problem in human communication over networks. Like the Web, this solution is the synthesis of a number of existing ideas that have been around for a while. We at Activerse believe very strongly that this solution to this problem in fact represents the next big wave of Internet software. As for the rest... the reader is, of course, free to draw his or her own conclusions.

by Joi Chevalier & Jeff Bone


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Last Modified: 24-Nov-97.

© 1997 by Activerse Inc. All rights reserved.