Web Swarm
From Mugshot Developer Wiki
| Web Swarm | |
 | |
| Design Process | |
| Current Phase: | Implement |
|---|---|
| People | |
| Engineers: | Colin Walters, Havoc Pennington, Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Owen Taylor |
| Ethnographers: | Nobody |
| Designers: | Bryan Clark, Mike Langlie |
| Multi-Disciplinary: | Donald Fischer |
| | |
| Blog: | |
| Bugzilla: | new, search |
| SVN: | /dumbhippo/trunk/server svn web |
Contents |
Define
Web Swarm is about passing around interesting links on the web to friends and groups and having an ad-hoc way of chatting about those links. Part of the idea is to not be invasive or confrontational like IM is attacking, but instead to be subtle and pervasive. We'd like the experience to be similar to overhearing a conversation happening outside your office: you can choose to join it or ignore it, but you're still aware of when it starts and when it ends.
The swarm aspect of Web Swarm is meant to allow conversations to build in a way they naturally do already: two or more people start talking and others who overhear are drawn in when they hear something they're interested in.
Research
For sharing of links we talked to a number of people who we consider forwarders to get a sense of what they send around and how they do it. Obviously email is the largest medium for this, but more and more IM is appearing as a means for sending around quick links to one another. IM has the additional benefit of allowing discussion to happen as well.
The idea behind the swarm effect is that there exists a curiosity factor in people that snowballs as more and more people participate in the curiosity. Each person's tipping point is different, but as each person caves in and joins the conversation, they drag in others.
Ideate
We had lots of ideas related to passing around links.
- Write plugins to mail clients to detect forwards and key off that
- Detect when someone goes to copy a URL and offer to send it for them
- Write plugins for the Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets that enable sharing links
And currently for swarming
- Sending the share notification as an email when people are offline
Prototype
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Choose
In the end we picked a system with a single Server for the web site and a Linux Client and Windows Client to handle the client side interactions.
Implement
Implement is the current phase in this activity's design process
The code for this is split into two parts. One is the server system, and the other is the Mugshot Client. Take a look at our subversion documentation to find out how to get the latest source code for both.
When coding on this project please take a look at these style guides
