From the Editors: Collaborative Computing Community Collaborative Web Computing: From Desktops to Webtops
Haifeng Shen, Zhonghua Yang · 2007
The Web began as a resource-centric, one-to-many medium in which authors essentially published static documents for the benefit of unseen audiences. Over the past few years, however, it has grown into a platform for people-centric one-to-one and many-to-many communication and collaboration. The Web is advancing toward essentially a social network that transforms the Internet into a locus for all things social—data and applications. The Web is becoming a platform where people work, interact, share, and collaborate beyond the reach of office and desktop applications. This trend demands innovative technologies and applications that support people to work and collaborate seamlessly in both single-user desktop and multiuser Web environments. Such technologies make desktop applications Web-aware in that they can talk to Web servers using standard Web protocols. The goal is for such technologies and applications to improve