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To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (16467)	8/24/1998 6:52:00 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116790

Some would say this is off topic, but I'll present it and let others just form their own opinion. Non-scientific poll What now for the President: csmonitor.com rh

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (16467)	8/24/1998 3:36:00 PM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116790

****** Off Topic ****** Domino effect coming to web By John Davidson Soon, visitors to a web site will be able to tell who else is visiting the site and reading the same page as them, and decide whether they want to contact their co-visitors to discuss things in real time, Lotus officials said last week. The new "awareness" technology, which could also be used to notify internet users when specified friends or associates came online, was being added to the next version of Lotus's web server, known as Domino 5.0. The new server is due to ship at the end of the year, said Ms Eileen Rudden, senior vice-president of Lotus's communications products division, during a visit to Australia on the weekend. It would be sold as a separate product for use by other web servers, such as Microsoft's Internet Information Server, she said. Business could use the technology to help build up virtual communities of interest around their web sites, she said. "Community" was at the core of thinking about ways to attract users to a site and keep them there long enough to make money out of them, yet many models for virtual community, such as chat rooms, required a minimum number of participants before they become meaningful, she said. With awareness technology, communities could begin to emerge around web pages with just two viewers, allowing businesses to build tightly focused user groups, she said. Not only would other viewers of a page be notified when someone surfed to it, but people within an organisation that owned the page could be informed, she said. Ms Rudden said it would be possible, for example, for someone from a call centre to send a real time message to someone visiting a particular product information page, to offer the reader the chance to ask questions in the hope of more effectively closing the sale. However, since many people used the internet precisely because it allowed them to escape over-zealous sales people, firms would have to be careful when using this technology, she said. Sites that bombarded users with real time messages would quickly be avoided. afr.com.au