Skip to main content

Past, Presence and Future

Some 18 months ago I wrote a post on Presence; Presence of Mined.

I figured it was time to revisit the subject of presence and see what is being said today.

The first post of interest is a piece over on ThreeDimensionalPeople is presence a red herring.

The core themes for presence not stacking up are:
  • unbound data means that everybody knows where you are, or aren't. This allows for negative reinforcement of people's opinions unless....
  • you can slice up you world and have your presence set my subscriber. This is the same process that you can perform in Yahoo Messenger by group and individual settings (but not Skype [yet]) but if you tried it then you know how time consuming it is, and this is their point. The other point for me is you need to be careful that your worlds don't overlap, otherwise you need to be able to control which setting takes precedence... the presence precedent
  • Context centricity, presence needs to be more subjective in how it's set [and received]
So where does this leave the players in the space today and in the future?

Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch has a nice piece on how (if at all) you can turn presence into cash money. It's worth a read as a great way to set context in the domain where it merges with voice revenues.

Before you read on it be worth taking a trip over to Wikipedia and looking at the key concepts from the collaborative publisher.

Chris Gare has written a very informative post on some of the key challenges today, the problem of too much access and maybe too many presence engines. He has part of the solution as PresenceWorks to control a global view of your presence from YIM, MSN, ICQ etc.

GigaOm were able to interview Alec Saunders (Iotum) about the TalkNow presence engine for Blackberry. This is aimed at bringing presence from the IM platform to the normal voice instrument to control what is termed as "telephone tag".

The real innovation in here would be combining this with roaming. I know that when I am away from Thailand I often resign myself to either leaving the phone on and running the risk of taking a non-important call (at my cost) or turning it off and maybe missing something important.
This binary state is ripe for changing and allowing authorized people to get me roaming and others not. Ideally the middle state of receive the call, but not connect and allow me to choose. I know this is as simple as look at your phone and see the number, but "private number calling" doesn't tell me a lot.

For some up to date stats on why presence matters read through Gary Kim on IPBusiness.

Rounding off the current state of presence the key theme for me today is the use of presence avoidance. The interruption management stuff we all get caught doing, making ourselves invisible or appearing offline to hide our true state. The final contributions here are from ConversationWare and Ken Camp.

So what's in the future? a great setter for where presence could, and some would say should, go is from Thomas Howe.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crisis Connections

What the flood situation in Thailand has shown once again is the power of social networks to fill the void of communication. In recent times the role of Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry messenger has been shown in good and bad light.  The same methods that released the Arab Spring have also been used to coordinate the London Riots . Love them or loathe social networks are here to stay and what the floods show is how they keep people connected.  Some will say there should be no communication void if central government is on top of its game, but with a situation that can change so rapidly, and over such a large area the traditional press certainly struggle to keep the public up to date. Twitter and Facebook have been saviours for those of us outside Thailand at this time.  With roving reporters and connected people like Patee Sarasin and Jetrin out doing and tweeting many more people are kept up to date. Equally useful is the ability to time shift news updates...
Post a Comment
Read more

Voice puts the pinch on Content

Content providers in Thailand are struggling to stay afloat after a restructuring of the revenue sharing between the mobile operators and themselves. Firms like Advanced Info Service (AIS) have been offering content on their 2.5G networks here for sometime. This has spawned a number of content partners to spring up. The previous arrangement were of the order of 65% to 80%. The new arrangement sets a 50:50 split of the revenue between proivder and operator. The operators say that this is due to the operating costs of their networks and that up to now this has been a trial offering. It smells more like a knee jerk reaction to falling revenues from voice. When will the market wake up and realize that paying for voice is dead. The secret to the success of operators going forward will be in the successful channeling of content, where voice is but another type of content. This is a worrying trend. If the pinch continues then I see that most of the content partners will not survive long. This...
1 comment
Read more

SKY New Zealand vaults into the 21st Century

New Zealand is a pretty country but it's also pretty slow in coming forward in many areas. It has it fair share of innovation but some parts of everyday life are still if not 20 years behind but at least 10...until now. Sky in the UK has made use of user driven options through handset interaction for some time, push the red button, Sky NZ still does not support this type of service. But this is where competition shows its value, it forces natural monopolies to innovate, and let's be honest Sky TV is a natural monopoly here by being the only digital TV service (which you have to use if you want to get a decent reception so Freeview doesn't count [yet]). Now Telecom has tied up with TiVo as the sole distributor in New Zealand Sky has had to play catch up, their response iSky. First impressions, given that the full service isn't launched yet, are good. Finally after years of me seeing other countries extending TV into the computer world with the likes of Yahoo -> TiVo ...
Post a Comment
Read more