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Over the last several years, studies of instant messaging have observed its increasing role in the workplace[1] and in social situations[2]. We propose that modifying applications to interact with users over Instant Messaging (as IM bots) extends the collaborative benefits of IM into new areas. As IM Bots participating in group chatrooms, applications that had previously been restricted to a single user command line are able to engage in many to many interactions between users and applications. Current command line oriented user interfaces can be made into collaborative interfaces that exhibit (at a basic level) the ethnomethodological property of accountability as well as supporting legitimate peripheral participation.
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Chan et al. (2005) studied this question.