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Babble

Conversation is essential. We use it as a medium for decision making. It is through conversation that we create, develop, validate, and share knowledge. When computational or bureaucratic systems prove too rigid, we figure out the work-arounds via conversation. Conversation is essential to business, education, and home and social life. Given conversation's centrality, it is astonishing how poorly digital systems support it.

The Babble prototype is the first in a series of steps to transform the way in which conversations are supported online. Babble a chat-like communication tool that allows its users to engage in synchronous or asynchronous textual conversations, and provides visual feedback regarding who has recently participated in a conversation.

Two features of Babble distinguish it from other chat systems. First, a minimalist graphical representation called a social proxy is used to provide information about who is currently present in the conversation. The proxy uses a large circle to represent the conversation, and colored dots (a.k.a. "marbles") to represent individuals. A marble inside the circle represents a user who is 'in' the displayed conversation; a marble outside the circle is in some other conversation. When a user interacts with Babble - either by posting a message, or simply by scrolling or clicking on the interface - her marble rapidly moves towards the center of the circle; with inactivity the marble will slowly drift out to the inner edge of the circle. In the figure, five participants have recently 'spoken' or 'listened,' two have been idle, and one is in a different conversation. Second, Babble conversations are persistent: the conversations stay on the server permanently, thus permitting asynchronous conversations and activities. A user who is not on-line when a comment is made can see it later, and can scroll back through the entire history of a conversation.

Babble has been in use for about four years, and has been deployed to over two dozen groups within IBM. We see it as a vehicle both for providing casual opportunistic interactions for distributed workgroups, and - over time - for capturing the knowledge generated in day to day working conversations providing a deeply social approach to knowledge management, in which knowledge maintains its links with the people who create and use it.

We have now developed a web-based successor to Babble called Loops. See the Loops Project page for more information.

The following interactive movie is made with Flash. You will need a plug-in to view it. It will take a minute or two to load, but it's worth the wait!

Publications about the creation, use and study of Babble are located on the Social Computing Group publications page.

Note: Babble was created by David N. Smith in August, 1997 and soon after extended to include a social proxy. The Social Computing group was formed in 1998.