Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Discount or incentive
Reexamination Certificate
1998-05-06
2001-08-14
Hafiz, Tariq R. (Department: 2163)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Discount or incentive
C705S014270
Reexamination Certificate
active
06275811
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a system and method for facilitating interactive electronic communication through feedback.
In traditional interactive electronic discussion groups, also known as message boards and news groups, users post messages which can be then be read by others in the discussion group. Examples include the Usenet public bulletin board system of the Internet, and the Lotus Notes discussion group software for corporate users.
Discussion groups have been around for more than twenty-five years. Early electronic bulletin boards posted messages from one person on a topic of interest which could then be read by dozens of other people.
Graphical user interfaces have replaced most text-based interfaces, but the basic technology has remained the same. On one system, a person posts a message on a topic of interest, such as Bicycling, C++ programming, or movies. That system copies the message to hundreds of other systems, where anyone interested in that topic could see the message. A message consists of two parts: the headers and the body. The headers include information such as where the message came from, the name of the author, the electronic mail address for the author, the subject of the message, the name of the discussion group to whom the message was intended, and so on. The body of the message contains text, graphics, or binary information relating to the subject.
As the use of the Internet has grown, users of discussion groups have suffered from increasing spurious messages posted to the group which are irrelevant to the topic of discussion or which are undesirable for other reasons. For example, Usenet discussion groups, which can be read by hundreds of thousands of users, are increasingly filling with three types of messages considered noise by most users: commercial messages advertising a product or service which most members of the discussion group would prefer not be in the discussion group, inflammatory messages wherein a group of people engage in heated debate on a topic which is boring to most of the other users of that group, and repetitious questions which are answered in a periodically posted “FAQ” (“answers to Frequently Asked Questions”).
Some specialized discussion groups use other mechanisms for computing the utility of proposed messages. For example, Lotus Notes uses sophisticated security techniques to ensure only authorized users can post messages to a particular group. Other discussion groups actually compute the utility of individual messages, but they base the computation of utility upon weighted averages of scaled ratings supplied by readers of the messages.
For example, at Stanford University during 1985-1986, the present inventor created a system which included weighted averages of scaled ratings and deployed it for the purposes of predicting users' valuations of messages, movies, and music they had not yet encountered.
Other examples are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,870,579 (1987) and 4,996,642 (1989), wherein a system is described for predicting ratings based upon a weighted average of scaled ratings of users who had already seen a set of messages and based upon the similarity of the users' ratings of items which had been rated by both users.
Similarly, the GroupLens research project initially at MIT and then later at the University of Minnesota used weighted averages of scaled ratings to Usenet. The commercial Firefly system provides another example of a system which predicts ratings based upon matching people with similar interest.
Some of these endeavors focus on collaborative filtering, where readers rate articles on a scale of 1 to 10 indicating how good they are. Then, based upon those ratings, similar users are grouped together. If A rates a message and has similar taste to B, then B can draw upon A's ratings to decide whether or not to read the message.
However, there are problems with traditional systems which rate messages:
When users see their messages rated, for example, 2.3 on a scale of 1 to 10, they are forced to either lose respect for the opinions of the system, or to lose respect for their own writing. Not surprisingly, most users end up losing respect for the system.
Traditional systems are all talk and no action; the system herein described facilitates the translation of ideas into commitments, and commitments into fulfilled commitments.
Traditional systems don't distinguish between people who contribute to a community and those who do; this new system creates the possibility of people getting greater attention from others as a result of their contributions toward a shared end.
Traditional systems that do include message ratings typically communicate a predicted rating of a message for an individual user, instead of the value of the message to the group as a whole. When the rating of a particular message is examined, it isn't obvious how many people have contributed to that rating. It could be five other people, or five thousand. Therefore, the predicted rating can be misleading to the group, and de-motivating to the author of a particular message. In addition, if one wishes to distribute awards to members of a discussion group based upon the value of their contributions, with such systems it isn't clear how to distribute said awards.
What is needed is a system and methodology that addresses and overcomes these problems.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to the invention, in an interactive electronic communication environment, incentives for positive contributive behavior are provided to authors and respondents who behave in a desired manner as determined by the system in order to facilitate the shared pursuit of common interests. The incentives are in the form of tokens of appreciation or value units denominated as points. In one embodiment, the points are converted into awards or other forms of public and personal recognition.
It is to be recognized that the true value of an action such as posting a message to a group is derived from the degree of appreciation shown by other users, rather than by a weighted average of ratings made by other users. The difference between points according to the invention and ratings of the prior art is analogous to the difference between money and grades. Money represents exchangeable value, while grades typically represent the evaluation of a single item by a single individual based upon criteria for success.
This invention features a system and method for accumulating and communicating points relative to a user based upon the evaluation of the value of that users' actions.
It is a goal of this invention to provide a system and method of authenticating and acknowledging, for each user amongst a group of users, that the user's behavior is contributory to the group, and the degree to which such behavior is contributory.
It is a further goal of this invention to provide such a system and method which accumulate and communicate points representing the value of variously proposing, committing to, and completing or failing to complete actions in a discussion group.
It is a further goal of this invention to divide members of a discussion group into subgroups based upon their degree of success in fulfilling shared interest as measured by said points.
It is a further goal of this invention to further divide groups into subgroups based upon the degree of shared interest shown by a particular subgroup. For example, if 5 people out of 30 all rate each others' messages highly, they can be placed in a subgroup together.
It is therefore a goal of this invention to provide a system and method which accumulate and communicate points representing the value of posting a message to other users in a discussion group.
It is a further goal of this invention to provide such a system and method which accumulate and communicate points representing the value of rating another user's message in a discussion group, for example by comparing said ratings to the ratings of others.
It is a further goal of this invention to facilitate the sel
Ginn Michael R.
Hafiz Tariq R.
Meinecke-Diaz Susanna
Townsend and Townsend / and Crew LLP
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