The design of the 'babble' timeline: A social proxy for visualizing group activity over time

We describe the design and implementation of the Timeline social proxy, a visualization widget that provides cues about the presence and activity of participants in an online conversation system. Unlike most awareness indicators (but see [4] for an exception), the Timeline shows the history of participants' presence and activities, thus providing cues about who has been 'listening' in asynchronous conversations. We discuss our experience with the Timeline, describing some of the ways in which it is used, as well as its design flaws and potential remedies. Copyright © 2012 ACM, Inc.