Some interesting thoughts expressed by Jean-Louis Seguineau and Alec Sanders on presence and moving the discussion beyond the simple approach the industry has today associated with real-time communications. It also touches on research my colleague Craig Roth is undertaking on attention management.
I believe successful presence systems will be those dealing with this kind of “impression management” concerns by providing more control on people's self image projection and interpretation. These systems will have to carefully balance the recipient's desire for control with the caller's desire to understand the recipient's context, while maintaining trust and usefulness. Today's approach of putting control of accessibility exclusively in the hands of the recipient is not consistent with face-to-face communication. In real life, the caller and the recipient share the context, and can both feel when starting or holding a conversation is not appropriate.
Source: antecipate: Feedback enabled presence
Today’s presence systems are about little more than availability awareness, and perhaps that’s the biggest problem with them. Far from being useful mediators in communications, they are in fact more intrusive than valuable.
Source: Seguineau: The Three Legs of Presence -- Alec Saunders .LOG
Several researches have largely explored the fields of "social presence" and "awareness". However, in my opinion, the emergence of "social networking" and "virtual community" requires adding the concept of “connectedness” to the features mix of any effective real-time communication system. I believe important to review these concepts and see how they inter-relate. These relations will have to be considered carefully when building what is commonly called "presence" into these communication systems.
Source: antecipate: The three legs of presence
Presence deserves a lot more attention (no pun intended) by enterprise architects and other strategists. On the one hand, you could argue that presence is a matter of network state. The simple examination would put this in terms of "being connected" to a network (e.g., logged in, signed on, and a buddy list display). But what if we expanded that concept of "network state" to other connectivity dimensions? We could think about presence in terms of your network state within social networks (e.g., your relationships, your credibility, your reputation) which in turn might be highly correlated to your network state in terms of the artifacts you produce (blog postings, how such posts are tagged, or linked to, or subscribed to, by others) which might then come back to issues related to your credibility and reputation within and across the groups, teams and communities you interact with. This, in turn, might encourage people to connect with you through some communication channel because they notice your presence icon in a buddy list and it says that you are available.
Complex, pervasive, evasive. Presence is all of these things.
Complex because presence is a difficult technology set that we are only beginning to comprehend cohesively.
Pervasive because presence management will need to integrate and interoperate across a collection of infrastructure, applications and services that will span work and lifestyle.
Evasive because presence remains an abstract concept on the one hand but is often often pigeonholed into a real-time communication slot.
In the short run, we need to focus and "get presence right" within the real-time communication domain. There are multiple issues related to aggregating, de-duping, brokering, syndicating, filtering, and federating presence in manners that honor privacy and attention management needs of users and enterprises. But, it's critically important that we avoid getting lost in the trees so to speak and continue to think in the manner exemplified by these postings to ensure that our minds are kept open.
Blog Design Update
Several things have changed this weekend:
October 29, 2006 in Commentary | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)