Patent ID: 8732593

Claim:
A method, comprising a computer system performing operations comprising: associating place attribute values with realtime interactions of a user and other communicants operating respective network nodes and sharing a virtual communication environment comprising virtual areas and supporting realtime communications between the user and the other communicants in the virtual areas, wherein the associating comprises, for each of respective ones of the interactions, generating a respective historical interaction record comprising a respective place attribute value that identifies the virtual area in which the interaction occurred and one or more communicant identifier attribute values that identify ones of the communicants who participated in the interaction; administering the network communication environment based on the historical interaction records, wherein the administering comprises querying the historical interaction records based on a query comprising at least one communicant identifier attribute value that identifies the user and a place identifier value that identifies a particular one of the virtual areas, and determining from results of the querying a set of the communicants with whom the user has interacted in the particular virtual area; ranking the communicants in the list based on the results of the querying, wherein the ranking comprises determining a respective relevance score for each of the communicants in the set of communicants based on at least one statistic derived from results of the querying of the interaction records; and ordering the communicants in the list by rank, wherein the ordering comprises ordering the communicants in the list of communicants by relevance score.