Loops: Designing A Web-Based Environment for Persistent, Semi-Structured Conversation

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small to medium-sized groups in a corporate environment. One goal of Loops was to preserve the lightweight conversation and awareness model developed in Babble. Creating this sort of environment on the web, a stateless and asynchronous medium, posed both design and implementation challenges. A second goal of Loops was to provide mechanisms for allowing users to impose structure on both static text and ongoing conversation. We discuss our approach—a server that uses TCP/IP-based XML communication to drive a client—and discuss the resulting system's architecture and interface.