When's the last time you crank-started your car or chopped wood to heat your house? The answer is, you didn't. Instead, you relied on technologies that have automated those once-routine tasks.
Unfortunately, presence technologies are still at the early-adopter phase, when manual intervention is often needed to let your contacts know that you're away from your desk, in a meeting, or online and available for communication.
What people need is the equivalent of an automatic transmission for presence. Approximately 95% of new cars sold in the United States come equipped with an automatic transmission, so that you never need to think about shifting gears while making your way through traffic. This frees your hands for more important tasks, like drinking coffee, talking on the phone, and gesticulating at your fellow drivers.
But seriously, presence technologies will never really take off if end users must manually set their availability every time they want to "switch gears" by going to a meeting, accepting a phone call, or wandering off to lunch.
Yet there are significant challenges involved in automating presence. Let us count the ways...
1. Ubiquity. Automatic presence will require presence to be embedded into more devices and applications. If your presence will automatically be changed to "busy: on the phone" when you are on a call, then your desk phone, softphone, and mobile phone all need to be part of the presence conversation. The same goes for applications as diverse as spreadsheets and gaming consoles.
2. Granularity. You may want to be in "do not disturb" mode when completing important tasks (e.g., interacting with an enterprise resource planning application) but not unimportant tasks (e.g., catching up on RSS feeds). But how are important and unimportant defined automatically, especially when these days so many tasks are performed in the same application (i.e., your web browser)?
3. Scalability. Automatic presence will probably be rich presence that incorporates information about location (you're unavailable because you're on a plane), activity (you're busy because you're in a meeting), device state (you're on the phone because you just picked up the receiver), and the like. This indicates that presence states will change more often - instead of four or five primary "gears" you will have an infinite variety of intermediate states. It also indicates that presence servers will need to be even more robust than they already are.
4. Usability. The emergence of ubiquitous, granular, rich, frequently-modified presence information could be difficult to handle for both presence producers and presence consumers. For presence producers, the aggregation of nuanced information from multiple sources could result in unintended presence states (do you really want your boss to know that you're on the phone when you call your spouse from your mobile phone)? Presence consumers might be confused by a large number of presence updates rather than an intelligent aggregation of presence states.
Some industry observers claim that these challenges will be overcome through powerful rules engines managed by end users themselves (e.g., "feed presence from my mobile phone into my presence aggregation only during work hours"). This seems unlikely. Replacing the drudgery of managing multiple devices with the drudgery of managing multiple presence rules simply moves the problem around, with the added downside that abstract rules are harder to understand than physical devices.
More useful would be devices that intelligently react to how they are being used. If you pick up the phone receiver or dial a number on your mobile, then you are mostly likely "on the phone." If you have not interacted with your keyboard in half an hour and your calendaring application knows that you are scheduled to be in a meeting for the next hour, then you are probably "in a meeting." If you are typing in a word processing application at the office, then you are probably working. If your car is running and your GPS location is changing rapidly, then you are probably busy driving. (Probably: there are always exceptions.)
Shared devices and multi-purpose devices pose a special challenge for designers of automated presence systems. The answer may be more information, not less. Which application are you using on your mobile device, the phone or the video player? Are you really working on a memo to your boss or writing a letter to a friend? Which person is driving, the husband or the wife?
Clearly there are privacy concerns here. People generally like to receive presence information from their friends and colleagues, but don't especially like to share information about themselves. However, the benefits of more effective communication will tend to outweigh concerns about privacy - as long as the end user has effective control over who may view their presence. These benefits will only increase as presence shifts from manual to automatic.
Dave Uhlir is Vice President of Products and Services at Jabber, Inc. For more information, please visit the company online at www.jabber.com.
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