Blobber tm (beta) Web Site Interaction Platform from The Digitalspace Commons
Background to Blobber
Blobber was developed from an earlier Digitalspace product called MeetingPage which was itself inspired by extensive work that Digitalspace did during the late nineties in the field of Virtual Worlds or Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE).  At that time we undertook various projects implemented in a system called ActiveWorlds that allowed us to design and implement 3D environments for various community and business purposes.  ActiveWorlds is just one of many similar CVEs that enable users to 'see' other users in the form of animated characters or Avatars in 3D renderings of landscapes or rooms and to be able to navigate within them by using a keyboard and mouse.  Real-time communications are achieved by means of associated text chat or even voice chat in some cases. Today, Digitalspace's 3D work is concentrated more in the area of simulations for niche areas such as space exploration but lessons learned from our community platform days were not lost on us. One thing we learned from ActiveWorlds was that a very important factor in online community development was for users to have an authentic sense of human presence in real-time.  In ActiveWorlds you could see how many people were in each world via a world listing then choose a world and navigate to it.  What was clear was that people tended to frequent the worlds that had more people in them rather than the unpopulated ones, mirroring the real world where the human flocking instinct encourages people to gather together into social communities.  This functionality gave Activeworlds, together with it's life-like avatar environment, a sense of reality that is rarely experienced with other Internet technologies. The downside of systems like Activeworlds is that a separate program needs to be installed and learned which creates a significant barrier to entry.  We felt that in order to make community more spontaneous it was important to develop a system that works in a standard web browser which is well understood by users and which would require no extra download. We developed MeetingPage which was initially intended to be a web based world list for Adobe Atmosphere which at that time had no equivalent facility.  We soon realized that the technique we developed was also able to detect people viewing standard web pages and so could be used to create a list of pages in a web site, detect how many people were on each page, show the population of each in an expandable site tree and allow people to navigate to any page in the list by clicking on it.  We then introduced many of the affordances common to other community systems such as Instant Messaging and Text Chat but without the 3D element. It became obvious very quickly from our experience of the beta program that there was still a problem.  People had to navigate to the MeetingPage community site in order to see the page populations and to take part in community events.  We then realized that in order to take down this final barrier to entry, we would have to make it possible for people to embed MeetingPage into their own web sites.  That way, anyone viewing the site would see immediately how many other people were on the site and be in instant communication with each other and with the site owner if they were also logged into the site. Blobber was the result of that realization and was so named because it sounds cool and it is certainly memorable! So that's the story of Blobber so far.  Please take a tour of its main features and also  feel free to join our beta program if you wish to test it on your own web site. Stuart Gold Creator of Blobber
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