As computing evolves, there is a growing demand to make the user's computing experience much more user-centric, or tailored to the particular user. Consider, for example, web browsers. Web browsers are application programs that execute on a user's computer and enable a user to navigate the web and search for content, typically in the form of web pages that are displayed on their computer. To make the user's web browsing experience more user-centric, most web browsers include what is known as a “add favorite” function in which a user can add particular web sites to a “favorites” list. When a user adds a web site or web page to their favorites list (in the form of a link), they physically create an entry in a database that maintains a URL (i.e. universal resource locator) associated with the web site or page. Anytime a user wishes to return to one of these web sites or pages, they simply pull up their “favorites” list, click on the appropriate link, and their web browser obtains and displays a web page that corresponds to the link.
Another way that web browsers attempt to create a user-centric experience is by keeping track of a very limited amount of so-called “history data” pertaining to the user's historical browsing activities. History data might include the last three web sites that were browsed by the user. The user can typically view this information by clicking on a feature that provides a drop down menu that lists links to the browsed sites. For example, on the web browser's navigation bar, there is typically a “back” and “forward” button that can be clicked by the user to navigate backward or forward among entries that are maintained in a navigation stack that keeps track of the user's browsing activities. The “back” and “forward” buttons can also have drop down menus associated with them that enable the user to display a drop down menu that might include links for the last three sites that the user encountered. By selecting one of these links, the user's browser displays the corresponding web page.
While these solutions provide a very basic user-centric functionality, they fall far short of providing a versatile, intelligently flexible and dynamic system. For example, many of these systems require the user to initiate or take some action in order for particular links to appear (i.e. the user necessarily must add a link to their favorites list). In addition, many of these systems are unintelligent in the way that they present information or links to the user. For example, a favorites list may have a large number of links that have been added by the user. When a user attempts to find a link to a favorite web site, their browser will typically present them with all of the links that are in their favorites list. It is then up to the user to find the appropriate link so that they can select it.
Another challenge in the general area of information use is that which is posed by the move toward context-aware computing systems. Context-aware computing systems are those systems that provide services to a user based upon their context. In the future, information processing systems are going to have to be sensitive to the user's desire to accomplish tasks in context-aware systems. For example, it may be desirable to provide services to a user without requiring the user to change their context in order to consume the services. As an example, consider the following scenario. A user is working in a word processing application on a particular document of interest. The document is provided by an application program that is executing on the user's computer and that displays the document in a window that is defined by the program. Consider now that the user receives four or five email messages during the course of working on the document. In order to view indicia of these email messages (i.e. the “From” and “Subject” fields), in today's computing environment, the user is typically required to pull up their email application program which separately displays a different window that includes the indicia that the user wishes to view. This is a “modal” operation in that the user is required to temporarily quit working on their document in the word processing application program so that they can view information provided by the email application program. Thus, the user is undesirably required to change their context.
This invention arose out of concerns associated with improving methods and systems that provide information to computer users.