Death Spiral

"Push Me, Pull You" (September Web Project) is a pearl. In three pages Jon Udell managed to bring in the "notification problem," object-oriented Web programming, Perl, data structures, and more. I've experimented with Web conferencing systems, and each time I've run into the notification problem. Average users will check a site once or twice, but if they don't "get" something (i.e., a new message), they won't check again. We missed this phenomenon in the past because most BBSes and newsgroups had huge audiences, so there was enough activity to avoid this "death spiral." Soon all Internet e-mail systems will support URL recognition. A subscriber-controlled notification mechanism, like the one you built, will wor k with e-mail URL recognition to build a nice collaborative mechanism. I'd like to be able to choose which discussions to subscribe to, and to re ceive intelligent notification of messages consisting of the subject, author, date, and perhaps one line of text. Notification could be based on activity thresholds, time intervals, or some combination of the two.

John Faughnan
john@umnhcs.labmed.umn.edu

I have run into just the "death spiral" problem you mention. (See news://dev4.byte.com/321FB220.78E//dev4.byte.com/jocon/_msg00084.html .) That spurred me to implement a notification scheme to help keep these conferences going. On the news side, people can cc the author of the post they reply to; I could have added this to the Web view as well. But an even better solution, as you suggest, is to let participants register to receive notification of any new messages and let them adjust the frequency of notification, as they can in the Virtual Press Room (VPR) system I described in my September column. Thanks! -- Jon Udell, executive editor