Synchronous Collaboration

The distinction between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration is somewhat arbitrary since there is no absolute dividing line between the two extremes. In some cases, participants receive very quick feedback from others. In other cases, the turn-around is more delayed (hours or days). Most systems are for asynchronous collaboration, meaning participants do not get immediate feedback. The reason is that WWW clients talk with servers and servers are passive, so clients cannot use servers to communicate automatically with other clients. Netscape's server push and client pull change this.

Synchronous (closer to real-time) collaboration capabilities are starting to be developed despite the difficulties.

Extending WWW for Synchronous Collaboration by Thane J. Frivold, Ruth E. Lang, and Martin W. Fong)
Rendezvous: A WWW Synchronization System by Dragomir R. Radev
Live Multimedia over HTTP by Jonathan C. Soo. Although not about synchronous collaboration, live connections are required for that. Similarly for Hello? Can you Hear Me? - Incorporating real-time audio on the Web by Stephen Uhler
A Synchronous Collaboration Tool for World-Wide Web by Tak K Woo, Michael J Rees
The Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory: UARC
Interactive Hardware on the Internet mostly on WWW. Again, this is at least half the synchronous collaboration equation, though most are not sampled very frequently.
Although not specifically for collaborative capabilities, an advanced technique for supporting interactive W3 capabilities is W3Kit.
Beyond Hypertext: Using the WWW for Interactive Applications
The Sociable Web project is making it possible to have synchronous, hypertext conferences as part of the contents of a Web page.
Ubique's Virtual Places (TM) product family provides a unified communications framework offering multimedia publishing, bulletin boards and live conferencing within a single software architecture.
Interactive Endeavors are not the same as collaborative, but close cousins.
MOOs, MUDs, and MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) are real-time interactive discussions set in a text-based virtual reality environment.
- What is a MOO
- Beginner's Guide to MOOing
- On the Interactive Classroom has links to other MOO information.
- There is a mailing list on MOOs and WWW: moo-www-request@maths.tcd.ie.
- Amberyl's List of Interesting MUSHes
- The MUD Resource Collection
- A MOO-Based Collaborative Hypermedia System for WWW by Tom Meyer, David Blair, Suzanne Hader
- Integrating the Two Most Exciting Internet Applications: The World-Wide Web and Multi-User Dungeons by Lee Newberg
- MOO-WWW Links - Research Guide and Resource Information - lets you add to a list of research projects.
- HyperMuds: Multi User Multi Modal Dialogue Systems by Stan P. van de Burgt
- The Sprawl is a Collaborative Hyperarchical Integrated Media Environment (CHIME)
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) FAQ
IRC Primer
Chats are multi-user synchronous systems that are primarily used for, what else, chatting. Among the most well known chats are the IRC and Compu$erves CB, but there are many other chat systems around the world.
Talker is a real time chat system, or as good as can be expected on the current Web.
VocalTec Web Service: Internet Phone
Mobisaic: An Information System for a Mobile and Wireless Computing Environment
Multicast Backbone on the Internet (MBONE)
Multiple User Multicast Basic Language Exchange (MUMBLE) - a program very similar to the UNIX chat program, only the text is transmitted over multicast IP groups allowing multiple people across the Internet to join the conversation.
Shared Mosaic supports live, interactive, view-only sessions.
Media On Demand
Videoconferencing groups
Desktop Videoconferencing Products
WebChat is not quite synchronous, but it's as close as standard HTTP allows.
Shared Mosaic or Mosaic-sh is an extension to NCSA's WWW browser Mosaic. Using Mosaic-sh you can conduct WYSWIS (What You See is What I See) kinds of collaborations/meetings.
An Exploration of Dynamic Documents in Netscape 1.1 using Server Push or Client Pull modes.
VPRO's Java GameServer uses Java.
Java Multiuser Environment
Worlds Chat
Global Chat
wOrlds is focused on the development of a next generation computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) framework.
Collaboratory for Environmental and Molecular Sciences has a WebTour package which will synchronize WWW browsers, so that when a tour "guide" changes to a new page, other "tourists" will automatically be taken to that page on their browser.
ReLaTe Project (Remote Language Teaching through Multimedia Conferencing over SuperJANET) is developing and testing video conferencing software for use in language teaching.
WebTalk uses telnet to establish a synchronous, continuous channel.
the Knowledge Media Institute's "Stadium" is a WWW experiment in very large scale telepresence, using Java, RealAudio, and CU-SeeME
Como - a Java-based interactive communication, is much like Habanero.