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

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.