Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button

Presence right now is horribly deficit and simplistic. I believe presence should not be defacto tied solely around a unified communication system - we need to step back and think of presence in a broader sense (including the social aspects) than what we have today in terms of being on-hook/off-hook with a phone or whether I am sitting at a PC (or Mac) and available (or not because I am busy with something).

There are some folks thinking out-of-the-box (Alec Saunders at Iotum with his concept of "new presence"). But existing vendors (namely Cisco, IBM and Microsoft) are biased towards advancing what they already have - which leaves us with SIMPLE (ugh) which has a horrible data model for presence and seems to be progressing at a glacial pace. There are some efforts underway to extend SIMPLE with "Rich Presence" but Microsoft is not implementing it and as far as I know, neither is IBM. XMPP could be a better approach but people seem to have blinders on when it comes to thinking about a presence service that is architecturally independent of IM, IP Telephony/VoIP, and SIP/SIMPLE.   

So the continued pontifications on social presence are intellectually stimulating but the reality-check is that until the industry gets together on the fundamentals (including a meta model, meta data, data/relationship model, federation within an intranet, etc) we will continue to see nifty applications that just will not become mainstream and create the type of network effects (in terms of social presence) that people want to see take hold. Without the glue - things tent to fall apart over time.

The Web 2.0 Summit kicks off next week here in San Francisco. Epicenter's Julie Sloane and I will be there, blogging and passing out cards (and just plain passing out).

The official theme this year is "The Web's Edge," whatever that means. But based on murmurings I've read recently, I'd like to propose a less official theme: "The Socialization of Presence."

I got to thinking about this after reading Chris Messina's thought-provoking blog post riffing on Google's acquisition of the social messaging service Jaiku. If you're not familiar with the news, see our coverage on Compiler.

Chris' post refers to a meme started earlier this year by Web 2.0 conference co-chair Tim O'Reilly called the "Web 2.0 Address Book," a nebulous product (yet to be invented) that's basically a location-aware contact list. The idea is that all of our real social apps already exist in the form of e-mail, your phone, IM and Twitter. We just need some glue to make everything work together.

The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are on Compiler

Comments

[Chris Cochella]

I could not agree more about an "architecturally independent" presence mechanism. We have been developing a presense system for collaboration within a Web application. This poses some interesting problems. The most obvious is how to keep users present throughout the application as as web pages load and reload. Our customers want collaboration in a variety of ways and contexts at different "places" in the Web application.

It would be nice to have a specification that consolidated the various presence mechanisms (IM, XMPP, IP, and so on) such that a person's presence could transcend their user-story or context at any given time.