Discussing Web Pages with Chat-Pointers in E-coBrowse

Conventional web co-navigation systems require the use of proprietary protocols or customized browsers to realize group awareness. Moreover, despite several advances in the field, awareness support in these systems remains unsatisfactory. We propose chat-pointer, a telepresence supporting and collaborative feature that augments telepointer with chat-style conferencing capabilities. Chat-pointer is built on top of e-coBrowse, an extensible Web co-navigation framework that allows embedding new functionality in arbitrary Web pages without modification to the browser. Apart from chat-pointer, we also discuss a suite of complementary awareness features that we have implemented to further facilitate multi-user coordination during Web co-navigation.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]