1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to social proxies, and more particularly towards a marketplace social proxy for the facilitation of business-to-consumer interaction.
2. Description of Prior Art
The growth of on-line consumer support and sales has led to important questions regarding consumer education, attitude change, persuasion, decision making, and satisfaction in on-line environments. Current on-line sales environments isolate consumers from one another. These sales environments provide only basic sales service, for example, offering a picture of the product/service and a general description. Some independent services (e.g., cnet.com) provide consumer-to-consumer interaction via bulletin boards to serve as distributed knowledge (opinion) reservoirs. However, no known direct sales approach has implemented a system or method for consumer-to-consumer interaction.
In the area of online user interaction, there are several efforts working towards creating a computer interface capable of displaying intangible qualities typically associated with live interaction. In particular, FTP, NNTP, IRC (e.g., The Palace), Babble, Loom, Coordinator, usage summaries for web sites, Ebay and Amazon.com's user interface. These systems include elements which relate to attributes normally associated with a physical interaction. For example, by posting the number of visitors to a web site (e.g., usage summaries), a user can have a feeling of belonging to a larger group of people interested in that web site. These and other systems are described below.
FTP allows online users “anonymous”—to have access to a collection of documents; one or more users being authorized to add documents to the collection. (See Ed Krol, The Whole Internet Catalog. O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. Sebastopol, Calif. 1992.) Interfaces to FTP-accessible collections of documents (e.g., bulletin boards) do not provide dynamically updated, graphical representations of the activity of a given online marketplace environment.
NNTP or network news, provides a venue in which users can asynchronously post messages and responses into administered news groups (i.e., predefined groups of messages which are meant to relate to specified topic, e.g., all articles in alt.sport.soccer should deal with soccer), every post indicating the ID of the contributor. Lotus Notes' discussion databases provide a functionally equivalent form of online interaction. Here again, no resource based on these technologies provide business users with a dynamically updated, graphical representation of the activity of a given online business environment.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is similar to NNTP in that it allows users to post messages and responses in predefined topic areas—called channels in IRC. The main difference with IRC is that the interactions are synchronous rather than asynchronous as in NNTP.
The Palace, is a collection of Internet chat rooms. The site uses a graphical display and user icons. A Palace Site is an online community where users can come together and chat while being represented by a graphical image. There are thousands of existing Palace Sites. Users can connect to The Palace Sites with The Palace Viewer (PTV) or The Palace User Software. Currently, channels available include: Welcome, TV, Movies, Music, Romance, Teens, and International. Within each channel is a collection of related Palace Sites. For example, within the Music channel, specific Palaace Sites may exist for particular genres or artists. TPV allows users to visit Palace Sites through their web browsers. With TPV and The Palace Server, a user can add a Palace community to a web site. The Palace User Software enables a user to connect to all the different Palace Sites located in Palace Space.
Other implemented forms providing synchronous online communication also exist, for example, Instant Messaging from Apple, and the discussion section of Groove from Groove Networks, Inc. Although these applications and systems provide user with a list of all operational clients, none provides a dynamically updated graphical representation indicating the type or level of activity of the users.
Loom, a visualization tool for Usenet (NNTP) news groups, provides a technique for displaying the emotional mood (e.g., hostile, happy) of an NNTP-based online community (e.g., a Usenet news group) by analyzing the content of its interactions. (See Judith Donath et al. “Visualizing Conversation” published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Conversation. Volume 4, number 4, June 1999.) Although this utility can analyze online interactions and provide a graphical representation of aspects of the interactions, it only provides this information asynchronously, specifically by analyzing the overall content records from each NNTP room. Thus, the graphical representation it provides is not dynamically updated.
Babble provides dynamic indicators of the presence and activity of all operational users with respect to the available topics (i.e., discussion areas created by the users). These indicators are computed using the activities of the participants (e.g., connections, postings, and topic switches). (See Thomas Erickson, et al. “Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of ‘Babble.’” published in Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI '99. ACM Press, 1999.) Although lightly structured styles of interaction are frequently adopted (e.g., interaction in the “-Commons Area-” is informal conversation, while interaction in the “Babble Problems” topic consists of serious question/answer dialogs), no way is provided to customize the graphical representation or the information it renders so that the specific critical qualities and quantities of an online marketplace are (dynamically) displayed.
Online games, like chess and bridge (e.g., Chessmaster 6000 by Mindscape, Inc.), provide structured and enforced styles of interaction, but not ones that dynamically and graphically indicate the activity of a given online marketplaces.
Coordinator, a method of structuring human communications, provides an electronic mail-based system that allows users to structure conversations and track tasks. For example, a typical interaction begins with a “Request” message from person A to person B, requesting something from person B by a certain date. This e-mail note asks Person B to respond with a “Promise” message (promising to perform the action), with a “Decline” message (declining to perform the action), or with a “Counteroffer” message (offering to perform the action by a different date or to perform a different action). If B promises to do the action, then a typical conversation might continue with B, eventually sending a “Report completion” message (indicating that the action has been performed) and A replying with a “Close” message (indicating that the action was performed satisfactorily). (See: Flores et al. “Method and Apparatus for Structuring and Managing Human Communications By Explicitly Defining the Types of Communications Permitted Between Participants.” U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,748, May 4, 1993.)
The Oval implementation of Coordinator extends the base functionality by allowing end-users to modify interaction rules mid interaction (see Malone et al. “Experiments with Oval: A Radically Tailorable Tool for Cooperative Work” via URL http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP181/index.html#4b).
Thus, Coordinator, implemented with Oval allows users to define and maintain structured styles of online interaction. These two facilities still fail to provide a dynamically updated, graphical representation of the state and activity within a given online marketplace; and handle interactions where messages are posted to a group of recipients, all of whom are not known a priori (e.g., as is the case in many online business environment, i.e., one often does not know who one's customers will be at the start of the day).
In the online auctions provided by Ebay.com., users can get data concerning the activity of other buyers and sellers (e.g., how many transactions they have successfully completed). Although this provides an indication of user activity in a online marketplace, no dynamically updated, graphical representation is provided.
Amazon.com also provides information concerning the activities and comments from it customers. E.g., for any given product sold by Amazon.com, one can learn what other buyers who have purchased the given product have also bought (e.g., customers who purchased the first Harry Potter book also purchased every other book about Harry Potter). Although this provides indication of user activity, Amazon.com does not provide any graphical representation, nor does it provide information that is dynamically updated.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and system for implementing a graphical online environment including consumer and business proxies for providing a dynamically updated, graphic view (representation) of current marketplace conditions.