In response to the recent poster who couldn't figure out what BuddySpace does, three quickies:

a) I think the comment a little further below, "instant messenger with... optional maps ... in addition to standard 'buddy lists'" should help.

b) there's a user guide including walk-through movies in .avi, .mov, and .swf format on the BuddySpace website, which should also help (see www.buddyspace.org or the 'More Information' link on the upper righ)

c) you nevertheless need to be 'into the world of Jabber (see www.jabber.org), before you're going to make a lot of sense of this, i.e. it relies on access to Jabber servers (there are many public ones out there) and a little poking around... plus a potentially lengthy Java Runtime Engine installation if you haven't got that already, so I wouldn't like to pretend this is anything like 'mass market IM'.

On the other hand, it's the most complete and full-featured Java implementation of Jabber (this is not just me talking: see the client feature tables at www.jabber.org), so will be of great interest in its 'niche'.

We're always happy to provide more info and help.. indeed the current 'info' page directly included many helpful comments provided by one of the posters here, Jim Weil, when we engaged in an email dialogue after his posting. We thought that the prominent 'tours' button on the home page would at least help people see at a glance what BuddySpace actually does!!

Why don't you tell people what this program does instead of spreading a lot of abstract marketing hype and spin? Not worth my time to even try unless I can understand what it can do for me. BTW: who wrote the first two anonymous reviews and gave it a 5 star rating - the author of the product?

There's a wonderful review of BuddySpace in Jon Udell's Weblog at http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/02/04.html