A conversational model to display user activity

The creation of mechanisms to motivate user participation became a necessary strategy for evolution and sustainability of many online systems. Nowadays, most of these mechanisms are based on a form of displaying user activity, e.g. through badges or ranking scores. In this paper we discuss the current use of activity displays as incentives for user participation, and present IntroText, an alternative conversational approach. Based on the metaphor of introducing someone, IntroText sketches a behavioral portrait of users in an individual and non-competitive way. We describe the implementation of this feature pointing out to its potential to influence online behavior.