Butterfly

Abstract

The Internet enables groups of people throughout the world to interact to discuss issues, get assistance, learn, and socialize. However, when there are thousands of loosely defined groups in which a user could potentially participate, the problem becomes finding the groups of most interest. In this paper we focus on the domain of Internet Relay Chat real-time text messaging, and describe a “social butterfly” agent called Butterfly that samples available conversational groups and recommends ones of interest. We discuss Butterfly’s motivation, usage, realworld design constraints, implementation, and results. Finally, we introduce work in progress on a multi-agent approach that has grown out of our experience with Butterfly.