In most such situations, one person has control of the remote or the keyboard and mouse, and the others present are relatively passive. Yet the browsing session can't be considered successful if the interests of others present are not taken into account. Collaborative browsing can take many forms. A group of people may be searching for specific information, exploring previously unexplored territory to see what's interesting, or some combination of the two. What links a person chooses to view and how a person reacts to what appears can also serve as a meaningful form of communication between the participants.
Participants can learn about each other as well as learn about the content of the Web pages.
Increasingly, also, we believe that Web browsing will be assisted by intelligent agent software, which can keep track of user's interests, inferring interest from observing user actions, and autonomously looking for items that satisfy interests. Letizia proactively fetches links from the page currently viewed, and chooses those pages that best match a user profile learned by watching the user's choices. We were interested in extending the channel surfing metaphor to situations where, as in TV, more than one person may be watching. The job of the agent is to choose, from the links reachable from the current page, those that are likely to best satisfy the interests of all the participants. Let's Browse .