Today I spent about three hours booking a holiday with my girlfriend. She was sitting next to me on the couch and we took turns in the 'driving' seat. i.e. using the browser. We used one laptop/browser because we were collaborating very tightly. The tasks we were doing include:-

* researching locations, accommodation, flights, activities, car rentals

* managing dates and prices

* doing the bookings - entering personal information & credit card details etc

After the 3 hours we had a two week holiday booked and used probably ~50 different websites. Note: we'd done some research on our own beforehand.

You'd think this would be a fun experience right? Well it was actually very frustrating with the other person wanting certain links to be clicked etc. We have very different browsing styles. Mine doesn't lend itself well to having two people 'driving'. So I ended up just doing whatever my GF wanted.

A few hours later I thought I'd find a tool that would help next time... The closest I got was the cobrowse Firefox plugin - which is a step in the right direction, but doesn't work with FF3 and uses leader-follower collaboration, not true collaboration.

Brainstormed Solution:

Why not use two laptops with two browsers and the ability to share tabs? Features would include the ability to:-

* share/unshare individual tabs

* lock/unlock scroll bars on shared tabs

* enter shared form data (obviously one browser proxies the other to maintain session).

* Maintain relative order of shared tabs.

* Highlight which tab the other person is looking at.

* Graffiti style annotation of webpages

I'm sure there are a bunch of others.

Questions:

How do you manage similar scenarios?

Do you know of any tools that would have helped?

What do you think of my 'Brainstormed Solution' above?

There are obviously some security and technical challenges, but I think it would be a fun project. Just wish I had the time.

Stuart.