Patent Application
20130054316
Computer users receive communications through a variety of channels, including but not limited to electronic mail, advertisements on web pages, instant messaging, social media and the like. Some of these communications are primarily commercial in nature, such as a form of advertisement or promotion intended to invite the recipient to evaluate or purchase a good or service.
Because of the variety of channels through which commercial communications are received, the presentation of such communications to a user is inconsistent and distracting. A typical user can find such communications a nuisance.
This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This Summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Commercial communications, such as advertisements or promotions, are collected from multiple channels and presented in a consistent format. Using metadata associated with or derived from such communications, they can be searched, sorted, displayed and otherwise managed in a way that allows them to be persistent instead of ephemeral.
Accordingly, in one aspect, commercial communications from one or more channels are received into memory. Information about the commercial communications is extracted and stored. One or more views of aggregated information about the commercial communications are presented to a user. The user is enabled to interact with the aggregated information about the commercial communications. Commercial communications can be filtered from noncommercial communications from at least one of the one or more channels.
The one or more views can include a calendar view of multiple commercial communications, and/or a map view illustrating a location of a source related to one or more multiple commercial communications. A view of the commercial communications can include grouping and displaying messages by sender, and/or by subject matter, and/or by keyword, and/or by other metadata associated with the messages.
One of the channels can include electronic mail and another of the channels can include advertisements from an advertisement server. Information about advertisements can be stored persistently for a user. Input from a user can be received for rating commercial communications. Such rating information can be stored with the information about the commercial communications.
In the following description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings which form a part hereof, and in which are shown, by way of illustration, specific example implementations of this technique. It is understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural changes may be made without departing from the scope of the disclosure.
The following section provides an example operating environment in which such a system can be implemented.
Referring to
As an example, the display generator 102 may be part of an electronic mail (email) system accessible by users through an internet browser (forming part of the user interface). The email system may present emails (some of which may include commercial communications), and also may include areas of the display that include paid advertisements (another form of commercial communication).
At least one of the channels 120 for communication includes a filter 112 that separates commercial messages 104 from other messages 114. In this example, the email system has a filter 112 that performs this function. It is possible for multiple communication channels 122 to have such a filter, such as shown at 116, which separates commercial messages 106 from other messages 118. However, in the case where the second channel is provided by an advertisement server, such a filter is not used.
The filtering operation performed by filters 112 and 116 can be any of a variety of possible ways of detecting commercial communications. A user can flag a sender as being a source of commercial communications. In such a case, the filter checks the sender of each communication against a list of known sources of commercial communications. A sender can tag a communication in a way that indicates it is a commercial communication. In such a case, the filter checks the tag of each message. Other filters could incorporate keywords or patterns of keywords, such as “offer expires” or the like. To the extent that the commercial communications are structured, or semi-structured, the information provided by such structure can be used by a filter.
The display generator 102 produces the display data 108 by aggregating the commercial communications from the different channels into a consistent view. By a consistent view, it is intended to mean that the communications from the different channels are presented in generally the same way, regardless of the channel from which they are received. It should be understood that the display could indicate in some way the source from which the communication was received, the content of the communications are generally presented in the same way.
In addition to the presentation, display generator 102 can manage and store information about the communications in storage 130. The storage 130 can include metadata about the communications, and could include a copy of the communications or information that would enable the communication to be retrieved from another source. Various metadata about the communication can include a name of the sender, sender location, sender contact information, date of receipt of the communication, subject matter, offer expiration date, and the like. Commercial communications thus can be stored (and deleted), either automatically or under direction from the user.
Given this context, an example implementation of such a system will be described in more detail below in connection with
In
In this example, the relative positions of the mail message section and promotions section are merely illustrative. The two sections can have a wide variety of relative positions, and can be displayed at different times or can be overlapping. It should be understood that such a display is merely an example. There are other ways in which the commercial messages could be displayed consistently.
In the example promotions section display, communications can be grouped, and groups can be displayed, such as shown at 206 and 208. Group 206 shows messages grouped by sender. Group 208 shows messages grouped by category. A group can be created using any of the metadata that has been captured for the commercial communications. In this example, each group is displayed using a word 210 indicative of the group, a number 212 of the number of messages in the group and keywords 214 extracted from the messages.
In
In
The rating 326 can be an interactive part of the interface. In other words, the system can present the rating in a manner that would allow a user to provide input about the rating. For example, as shown in
Similarly, the system can maintain a list of favorites of the commercial communications. In response to the user selecting a message as a favorite (for example, by selecting an “add to favorites” button 332), information about the message can be stored in a favorites list.
If the message has a source (such as shown at 330), the user can select to see a map with this source on it. In response to such a selection, a map tab 340 is displayed. On the map tap, a map can be displayed illustrating the location of the vendors associated with one or more selected messages.
If the message has a date (such as shown at 324), the user can select to see a calendar with this (and optionally other) communications in a calendar view. In response to such a selection, a calendar tab 350 is displayed (which is described in more detail below).
Also in this example, a set of tabs, or, different views, also is provided as indicated at 340, 350, 360 and 370. In addition to the map tab 340 and calendar tab 350, this example also includes a find tab 360 and a manage tab 370, also described in more detail below. It should be understood that these different views are merely illustrative and not limiting of the invention. Other views could be provided, and other mechanisms for activating such views other than tabs can be used.
An example calendar view of the commercial communications will now be described in connection with
Having now described some example displays and interactions with the system, flow charts describing example operations of such a system will now be described in connection with
In
An example of such user interaction is shown in
Such a system allows commercial communication to be managed and manipulated by a user in a convenient manner. In addition, information about otherwise ephemeral advertisements can be retained. Such tools make commercial communications more useful to consumers and increase their utilization and impression rates, which is beneficial to advertisers.
Having now described an example implementation, a computing environment in which such a system is designed to operate will now be described. The following description is intended to provide a brief, general description of a suitable computing environment in which this system can be implemented. The system can be implemented with numerous general purpose or special purpose computing hardware configurations. Examples of well known computing devices that may be suitable include, but are not limited to, personal computers, server computers, hand-held or laptop devices (for example, media players, notebook computers, cellular phones, personal data assistants, voice recorders), multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based systems, set top boxes, game consoles, programmable consumer electronics, network PCs, minicomputers, mainframe computers, distributed computing environments that include any of the above systems or devices, and the like.
With reference to
Computing machine 700 may also contain communications connection(s) 712 that allow the device to communicate with other devices. Communications connection(s) 712 is an example of communication media. Communication media typically carries computer program instructions, data structures, program modules or other data in a modulated data signal such as a carrier wave or other transport mechanism and includes any information delivery media. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one or more of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encode information in the signal, thereby changing the configuration or state of the receiving device of the signal. By way of example, and not limitation, communication media includes wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.
Computing machine 700 may have various input device(s) 714 such as a display, a keyboard, mouse, pen, camera, touch input device, and so on. Output device(s) 716 such as speakers, a printer, and so on may also be included. All of these devices are well known in the art and need not be discussed at length here.
Such a system can be implemented in the general context of software, including computer-executable instructions and/or computer-interpreted instructions, such as program modules, being processed by a computing machine. Generally, program modules include routines, programs, objects, components, data structures, and so on, that, when processed by a processing unit, instruct the processing unit to perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. This system may be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in both local and remote computer storage media including memory storage devices.
The terms “article of manufacture”, “process”, “machine” and “composition of matter” in the preambles of the appended claims are intended to limit the claims to subject matter deemed to fall within the scope of patentable subject matter defined by the use of these terms in 35 U.S.C. §101.
Any or all of the aforementioned alternate embodiments described herein may be used in any combination desired to form additional hybrid embodiments. It should be understood that the subject matter defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific implementations described above. The specific implementations described above are disclosed as examples only.
