The buzz: supporting user tailorability in awareness applications

Information awareness applications offer the exciting potential to help people to better manage the data they encounter on a routine basis, but customizing these applications is a difficult task. Most applications allow users to perform basic customizations or programmers to create advanced ones. We present an intermediate customization space and Cocoa Buzz, an application that demonstrates one way to bridge these two extremes. Cocoa Buzz runs on an extra display on the user's desktop or on a large shared display and cycles through different information sources customized by the user. We further demonstrate some of the customizations that have been made using this approach. We show some preliminary evidence to suggest that this approach may be useful at providing users with the ability to perform customizations across this spectrum.