Importance

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Abstract

An invention is disclosed that uses methods and systems for enhancing users' Web surfing experiences by providing various functions including: delivery of content that is related to the user's present location or actions; providing collaborative browsing tools that manage the participants' rights interactively to control a particular collaborative browsing session; aggregating and then sharing with users information related to a particular Web site, action or object on the Internet; and offering various types of predefined collaborative browsing sessions in order to enhance the users' online experiences. These and other functions are accomplished via a browser companion that is downloaded or incorporated into the users' Web browsers. The browser companion communicates with a back-end server architecture that couples to various databases. The browser companion provides the appropriate server(s) with information about each user's present location or action within the network, e.g., Internet. The servers provide the browser companion with the information related to the user's present location or action, such as links, other ongoing collaborative browsing or chat sessions, community groups, or bulletin boards. Likewise, a session server manages the users collaborative browsing session and tracks the various administrative privileges that are dynamically assigned to each session participant based on the status of the session, the status of the user and the user's requests for particular rights.

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First Claim