TinLizzieWysiWiki andWikiPhone: Alternative approaches to asynchronous and synchronous collaboration on the Web

Abstract

This paper presents TinLizzie WysiWiki and WikiPhone, two systems which explore new approaches to media-rich end-user collaboration on the World Wide Web. TinLizzie WysiWiki enables authoring of interactive, media-rich documents, containing graphical objects bearing user-defined scripts, on the Web. In TinLizzie WysiWiki, a user manipulates text and active objects in a WYSIWYG graphical editor in a manner similar to Squeak eToys. A notable aspect of TinLizzie WysiWiki is that it allows both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration among multiple users. In asynchronous collaboration, the user content is saved in a common format and posted on the Web. Later, another user can visit and update the document on the server. In synchronous collaboration, more than one user can share a document and edit it simultaneously and collaboratively in real-time. The second system presented is called WikiPhone. WikiPhone is a minimalist voice over IP (VoIP) system which uses only HTTP. WikiPhone allows multiple users to talk to each other using a web browser. WikiPhone's strength is its simplicity in terms both of the user experience and of its implementation. The user simply points a Web-browser to a URL, and then directly participates in a conversation, or listens to ongoing conversations among others. In the implementation, it seeks the simplest possible approach, yet provides a usable VoIP system. Both systems still require a small, portable Web browser plugin, but otherwise they stay within the artificial limitations of today's World Wide Web. The authors think that they exhibit possible future directions for collaboration on the Web.