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An instant messenger that allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard buddy lists BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists:
it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard 'buddy lists';
BuddySpace is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others;
BuddySpace is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform;
it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available. But BuddySpace is about more than just 'messaging', as we explain below
BuddySpace generalizes the concept of 'Buddy List' (popularised by Instant Messaging tools such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger) to provide multiple views of collaborative workgroups according to users' needs and tastes. Our aim has been to provide a personal 'dashboard' or 'radar screen' so that one can observe the availability and 'interaction state' of colleagues worldwide in a manner that exhibits the following desirable properties:
immediate: real-time updates need to be pushed instantly to users rather than pulled in by request -- the push approach helps keep updates more palpable and informative
peripheral and therefore non-intrusive: users lead busy lives, and dislike being bombarded with yet more information, so we aim to keep awareness of colleagues available in a compact manner that can be noticed peripherally
customisable: some people prefer simple or hierarchical lists, some prefer visual maps, some prefer status lights, and so on; some prefer a 'Windows' look-and-feel, some a 'Mac'-- we need to cater for diverse user preferences and capabilities
scaleable: we have to provide ways to indicate the presence of potentially enormous numbers of people, even given that these numbers will be filtered down for personal use -- researchers inhabit workspaces with many hundreds of colleagues around the globe; the Open University has well over 150,000 students online; large peer-spaces like music swapping communities have many millions of users connected simultaneously
interoperable: with several hundred million users of the 'Big Four' (AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!), it is crucial that any approach allow interopebility with systems to which our users already subscribe; this is one of the many reasons we built BuddySpace entirely on top of Jabber (www.jabber.org), which provides gateways to the 'Big Four' products.
cross-platform: we need to service a community not only on Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac desktop and notebook configurations, but also on PDAs and mobile phones -- we therefore develop entirely in Java
XML-literate: for future intelligent applications, communication transport needs to be about more than just string-transmission; another we adopted Jabber is that it is based entirely on a generic XML transport architecture, ideally suited for this purpose.
open source: for the research community to join us and to gain leverage via our research output, we have ensured that BuddySpace is open source, available on SourceForge.
clean: BuddySpace adheres rigorously to the Jabber specification, which means that it interoperates with other Jabber clients and servers without danger of the rogue behaviour that non-standard implementations inadvertently allow (e.g. the semantics of users inhabiting multiple groups is undefined in some clients, and can cause crashes).
extendable: BuddySpace deploys a plug-in architecture which means that additions, such as new visualizations, and new concepts such as gaming interfaces, are readily achievable
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