Support for Meeting People on the Internet
Jun Kakuta, Kazuki Matsui and Hiroyasu Sugano
Information Service Architecture Laboratories,
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.
64 Nishiwaki, Ohkubo-cho, Akashi
674-8555, Japan
ABSTRACT
We propose a profile card communication service to support Internet communications. Profile cards can be attached to web pages and distributed among people on the Internet. It gives us more opportunities to get to meet people while presenting privacy.
KEYWORDS:
Instant Message, vCard, Distribution of Profile, Privacy
INTRODUCTION
There are millions of people on the Internet, however, it is not so easy to meet those we feel to be compatible with. Directory services may help us find communication partners, but they provide little information about them. We have to go to their web page, if they have one, to determine whether they are the kind of person we look for, and then, e-mail them to initiate communications. We think, however, that e-mail has inherent barriers for starting communications. In this paper, we describe a service that enables us to easily initiate communications while providing a "profile card" of them, which can be used for subsequent contact with them and can be distributed to other people on the Internet.
REQUIREMENTS FOR OUR SERVICE
We think that finding compatible people and sending messages easily can reduce the barriers involved in initiating communications. Web pages provide various kinds of information about page owners allowing us to decide whether they are to our liking. We consider the ICQ web-pager panel (Mirabilis, 1997) to be pretty good as it enables page visitors to send messages easily without any other applications. We also focused on this potential, and, in addition, think that distributing profiles will provide more opportunities to meet compatible people. Based on these considerations, we propose a profile card communication service to satisfy two requirements: ease in starting communications and distributing profiles to meet more compatible people.
PROFILE CARD COMMUNICATION
A Profile card is a visual electronic card with a send message feature and includes various kinds of profiles. It was implemented by extension of vCard, the proposed electronic card standard format for use on the Internet. The next sections describe three features of our proposed service using profile cards.
FUN TO CREATE
We prepared the card layout using the standard extension method as stipulated by the vCard specifications. This enables card creators to freely arrange information on the card and choose font attributes for the text, so that they can create original cards easily. This stimulates creativity and makes it fun. Profile cards can be used as a visual representative of an individual on web pages, e-mail and so on.
EASY TO START COMMUNICATION
We added a send message feature to the card, which enables web page visitors to start communications easily. All they need to send a message is the card embedded in a web page. Messages are processed with a server, and all messages are stored in this server if card's creator cannot immediately receive the message. Later, when they log to the server, they can retrieve the messages that were stored during their absence. Visitors can get cards from web pages and store them in a card folder application. As described above, the profile card itself has a feature that enables it to be used for communication. Collecting cards can greatly enhance our motivation to communicate with others, and, therefore, we think it is one of the important aspects of our service.
GUARANTEE OF PRIVACY
To ensure privacy, server should construct the contents of cards with information that is limited by the qualifications of the requester. Although the card embedded in a web page generally includes a limited profile, such as maybe only an e-mail address, other profiles should be retrieved from the server. This will determine whether he/she has the adequate qualifications for retrieving a profile or not. Only after the server judges the qualification to be proper does it agree to the request and reveal the profile. The presence or absence of the card's creator will also be shown if allowed by the card's creator. Everyone can forward profile cards to a third person. When someone gives it to a third person, the server should always add a distribution history property to the card information. This makes it possible to communicate with any person in the distribution history. In this way, our service offers users privacy and flexibility, and provides more possibilities to meet more compatible people. Figure 1 shows a snapshot of our service.
Figure 1: Snapshot of Profile Card on a Web Page and Card Folder Application
CONCLUSION
We pointed out that sending messages from web pages could eliminate the barriers for initiating communications with a stranger. We also think that distributing profiles would broaden circles of friends. With these considerations in mind, we proposed the profile card communication service described in the previous sections. This service, if it functions as we expect, would eventually make both cyber life and daily life more enjoyable. We have just started developing a prototype of the service. We will conduct experiments to verify the effects of a profile card communication service.
REFERENCE
Mirabilis LTD. (1998) ICQ Web-Pager Panel Enable Your Visitors to Contact You
From Your Site. http://www.mirabilis.com/webpanel/index.html.
