In developing Community Organizer, we modeled the early stage of community formation as the following four phases: "Browse," "Find out," "Approach," and "Talk." The system visualizes how close people's interests are to each other and then leads a user to act along these phases.
Each icon on the screen represents its associated user's interest. Its placement in relation to others reflects the closeness of users' interests. By observing how icons are distributed, users can understand other people's interests and envision potential communities.
One of this system's features is giving users the ability to express what they are interested in by simply putting their icons into view without composing concrete messages to others, as required in the existing media such as WWW pages and mailing lists.
[1] Hattori, F., Ohguro, T., Yokoo, M., Matsubara, S., and Yoshida, S.: Socialware: Multiagent systems for supporting network communities, Comm. ACM, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 55 - 61 (1999).
[2] Yoshida, S., Kamei, K., and Hattori, F.: Supporting the Formation of Communities on the Internet (in Japanese), Technical Report of IEICE AI 98-30, Vol. 98, No. 202, pp. 69 - 76 (1998).