Buddyspace

I. T. Vogiazou, M. Dzbor, J. Komzak, and M. Eisenstandt. Buddyspace: Large-scale presence for communities at work at play. In Inhabiting Virtual Places, Workshop at E-CSCW-03, Helsinki, Finland, September 2003.
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This paper describe the author’s concern towards the spontaneous establishments of human groups and interaction, which they think leads to a powerful collaboration. The framework in which they develop their research is based on some fuzzy ideas of how providing people location is useful in terms of their collaboration. Two points are interesting: the grounding in familiar visual metaphor enables people to focus on the content rather then incurring in the cognitive overhead to make sense of what is shown. The second is that context matters for interacting meaningfully. The testbed they used to explore these concept is an instant messaging client for Jabber that was specifically redesigned to give the user the ability to see the partners on a customized map. Finally, this study was not grounded into a strong experimental framework.