Butterfly

The Internet allows virtual communitees to form and interact without regard to geographic barriers. The problem becomes the sheer wealth of virtual communities: How do you find which of the thousands or millions are of interest to you?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one example of an Internet medium in which thousands of virtual communities of interest (channels) are created ad-hoc, and there are few aids to finding the few that would be of most value to you.

Butterfly is a software agent that helps you find IRC channels. It works by maintaining a keyword profile of your interests, sampling the conversations in various channels, and recommending channels of supposed interest.

A paper with details of Butterfly was presented at IUI'99, and the slides are available.

Neil W. Van Dyke, Henry Lieberman, Pattie Maes, "Butterfly: A Conversation-Finding Agent for Internet Relay Chat," Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 1999.