Dynamic neighborhoods: browsing the World Wide Web together

We introduce an original scheme that turns the World Wide Web (WWW) into a social place. Our vicinity-based approach is to show the Web's user space to the people surfing on the WWW. Being aware of other Web surfers, people browsing the Web may invoke synchronous communication by a single mouse-click -- surfing the Web turns from a lonely affair into a joint experience. We present the basic theoretical concepts of our approach and give a short overview over CoBrow, a collaborative browsing service that implements the concepts presented in this paper. We also try to assess the social impact of services like CoBrow, which bring people together in a virtual world.

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