Alec Saunders writes again!
In a recent posting, Alec writes about the pain of Presence and why the application context needs to change. You can read about it here…
Here are my comments on the question of Presence and where it's headed:
"Presence as we know it, is largely unfulfilled partly because it's ubiquity is largely incomplete (my phone is available for ringing, but my AIM id doesn't know that) as you've pointed out. Even more so, I'm not convinced that it will get any more sophisticated than it already is.
That's because, in over 100 years of operation, the phone still rings when somebody (sometimes a machine) calls me. IM still goes bloop when somebody IM's me. I get to decide whether to respond or not. If the industry was working on something to help Howard know that I'd welcome a call from Howard in the next hour – that's useful to me and my business.
IM id's are largely personal and not often shared on business cards. Even if they are, it still feels uncomfortable IM'ing with somebody that you've only just met. This is just like when cellphones first came out and people started putting them on the business cards. It felt uncomfortable to call the person on the mobile because it was so expensive (for them), audio quality was so poor and it wasn't an emergency."
