Patent ID: 8191001

Claim:
A method, comprising by a computer system performing operations comprising: associating place attribute values with interactions of communicants operating respective network nodes in a network communication environment supporting realtime interactions of the communicants in 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 respectively identifies at least one communicant, and determining from results of the querying at least one of a set of the virtual areas in which the at least one communicant interacted and a set of the communicants with whom the at least one communicant has interacted in respective ones of the virtual areas; 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 historical interaction records, and the ranking comprises ordering the communicants in the list of communicants by relevance score.