Re: [Membership] A Model for Community & Global

[Antoun Nabhan <anabhan@law.harvard.edu>]

At 04:19 PM 3/11/99 -0800, gds@best.com wrote:
>toml@communisphere.com wrote:
>
>> OK, I guess I'm not clear on this point. If my neighbor to the left has
>> AOL, and the one to the right XYZ, how does this piece of add-on
>> software they are to install provide notification about community
>> affairs?
>
>> When they log on to their providers does it download our community info
>> to their system? And then a community flag on their browser goes up
>> saying "New info has arrived." ?

Yup, that's what I had in mind.

>I think if you set up a web site for your community resource, and have
>a Java applet launched whenever someone from your community visits it,
>it can provide the automatic type of community information you want.
>The applet can be customized to do various types of automatic information
>update.  The details of how to do this should be in any good book on
>Java and Web programming.  You can instruct the members of your community
>to make the community resource site their home page, so effectively
>whenever they connect to their provider, it will launch the applet,
>provided that there is connectivity between the provider and your
>community web site.

I was thinking of something more PointCast-like: push technology, with the "Community Sphere" application running in the background and then connecting to the appropriate server every time you connect to the Net. I don't *think* there's a way to make a Java applet persist after you exit your browser/JVM.

This would work regardless of who your ISP was. Caveat: I don't know how AOL actually works - do they give you a real IP connection, or does their system just pipe HTML content through a proprietary protocol?

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