Chat circles

  • Authors:
  • Fernanda B. Viégas;Judith S. Donath

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA;MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Although current online chat environments provide newopportunities for communication, they are quite constrained intheir ability to convey many important pieces of socialinformation, ranging from the number of participants in aconversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich faceto face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstractgraphical interface for synchronous conversa-tion. Here, presenceand activity are made manifest by changes in color and form,proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups intoconversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation aremade visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal inthis work is to create a richer environment for onlinediscussions.