Patent ID: 8407356

Claim:
A method of communicating content among users using of a computer system including a controller computer and a database which serves as a repository of tokens for other programs to access, thereby affording information to each of a plurality of participator computers which are otherwise independent of each other, the method comprising: authenticating a first user identity and a second user identity according to permissions retrieved from the repository of tokens of the database; affording some of the information to a first of the participator computers via the Internet network, responsive to an authenticated first user identity; affording some of the information to a second of the participator computers via the Internet network, responsive to an authenticated second user identity; running controller software on the controller computer, in accordance with predefined rules, to direct arbitration of which ones of the participator computers interactively connect within a group of the participator computers; providing an API on the controller computer, the API multiplexing and demultiplexing API messages by type, creating a virtual connection and providing the virtual connection between channels, private messages, and multimedia objects in the controller computer and the participator computers; and communicating real-time messages within the group of the interactively connected said participator computers.