Chat to Other Visitors with WebRogue

You’ve been checking out an interesting web page, such as this one, for instance, and want to be able to chat about it with other visitors to the same site. According to computer scientists at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sardinia, an application originally developed in 2005, WebRogue, could bridge the gap between your virtual presence on the web and other users. It has more recently inspired new functionality in research prototypes and commercial systems that are enabled, if not web 3.0, then at least web 2.5.

So, what did WebRogue do? “The rationale behind WebRogue - a Firefox toolbar plugin - was simple indeed,” explain Alessandro Soro and colleagues, “a web browser and a chat client are linked together and each time the user loads a web page, they get to see who is connected to that site and can start an end-to-end chat session with other users.”

Soro and his colleagues, Ivan Marcialis, Davide Carboni, and Gavino Paddeu explain that the application could allow users to aggregate around sites of interest, just as happens in the real world of water coolers and coffee machines. The system is not controlled by the site’s webmaster and allows users to whisper (i.e. send private messages to each other) or shout (sending messages for anyone to read). It also had additional functions, such as group surfing with a leader taking other surfers off to other sites, and queuing, useful for tech support instances or speaking to a librarian in a virtual library or an assistant in a virtual shop.

Presumably, you are not reading a printout of this page handed to you by a colleague. In which case you already appreciate that the web browser is the most immediate internet application. You can be up and running with a browser and finding information within seconds, whereas and email client, news reader, or instant messenger program, requires configuration, sign up and login.

However, despite this immediacy and the hopes that the web would provide people with a virtual meeting place, on the whole web browsing (aside from more obviously interactive sites like Facebook) is pretty much something you do on your lonesome.

There are many websites that have tried to bring users together and to build communities. I worked for one of the very first specialist virtual web communities - www.ChemWeb.com - as long ago as 1997. At one point we had more members than the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society put together. However, as with most of the communities that followed, the tools available to users are there because the owner of the website put them there. Obviously, Facebook applications are starting to change this, at least for users of that specific site. You cannot, of course, use Facebook apps, games, and such on another website.

WebRogue is different. It links your virtual presence on a website and other users browsing the same page. Originally, the researchers saw various applications of Webrogue from E-learning and training to technical support and real shopping in virtual places, as well as the afore-mentioned group surfing. “The goal of WebRogue was to enable the birth of online communities around websites of interest, allowing seamless exchange of opinions in a free, non-moderated manner between site visitors and between visitors and site owners,” the team adds.

The researchers’ focus has since shifted to P2P collaborative systems and multiuser interface designs. As such, this application now sits in the broader arena of virtual presence systems, since many features included in WebRogue have inspired analogous functionalities, both in research prototypes and commercial systems, the researchers say. You can find out more about virtual presence systems, including Webrogue and its successors here

More details of the Soro study can be found in the International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2007, 3, 448-459.