Beyond Internet Business-as-Usual: Populating the Electronic Shop

POPULATING ELECTRONIC SHOPS In this position paper I will argue for the consideration of the social nature of the (electronic) shopping process and I will describe a prototype supporting communication and collaboration among providers and consumers. The CSCW3 prototype constitutes a WWW browser with vast collaborative functionality. The basic metaphor is the room metaphor—each WWW page is treated as a room; the sum of all rooms constitute a house. A room consists of a WWW page and all users, who are logged in on the same CSCW3 server and who visit the respective WWW page at the same time.