From The Archives: The Future Of Presence (May 2003)
The swirl of interest in social presence apps like Twitter and Jaiku led me to root around in the dusty end of my hard drive. Back in May 2003 (Yikes!) I wrote an issue of my Message newsletter entitled The Future of Presence: Don't Strangle The Killer App. A large excerpt:
Presence is the killer app of the next generation of software technology. Of course, this is somewhat inaccurate, since presence – the information served up by instant messaging about the online status of users – is not an application, per se. Still, the sentiment is right. It’s not text messaging that has pushed the enormous growth of instant messaging: it’s presence.Ubiquitous Presence…
Presence means many things, and is used in many different contexts, and soon will be ubiquitous – inserted in every enterprise application, pulled from every computing device, and is likely to link together an increasingly diverse set of ‘users.’ The association of presence with people has been the principal area of interest to date, but in the near term we will witness an explosion of uses for presence. Some examples:
‘Bots – The use of quasi-intelligent agents, or ‘bots, as a conversational interface to enterprise applications or enterprise information sources is growing. As a direct consequence, ‘bots inhabit the buddy list, and their presence and availability is served up just like human users.
Devices – Computers and other networked devices are being brought into the presence networks within large companies. Computing-related equipment like printers, routers, scanners, and even non-computing hardware, like air conditioners, elevators, and surveillance cameras are being connected to the presence network, and serving up their presence and availability through the same instant messaging metaphor. This allows users to check the status of a printer, for example, and could direct the printer to retry a print job through a ‘bot interface. Likewise, these devices could notify individuals or groups of problems when encountered, in real time.
Inventory – The development of low-cost radio transmitters that can be attached to products and parts in supply-chain inventories or in transit offer an interesting mechanism to track location and status in true real time. (Note that the bar-code scanning approach – such as that used by UPS and Fedex for packages in transit – is not even close to real time. What you get when querying their web site tools for package tracking is the time and location of the last bar code swipe, not the actual location of the package.) The recent announcement by German retail giant Metro AG about their Future Store – which relies on RFID presence detection of packaged goods in place of bar code scanning – represents a consumer market equivalent with enormous growth opportunities.
Location – Cell phones constantly update their location to their cell system, and this information is being associated with presence by many cell providers as an aspect of their instant messaging solutions. This allows individuals to be able to geographically locate their buddies when presence information is associated with maps. While the cell providers are generally touting these capabilities as something attractive to young customers – in the 15-25 year old segment – I see this as an incredibly attractive business tool, as well. Consider the use in a large corporate campus, or in a factory.
Places – In the corporate setting, it certainly would be beneficial to associate the status of physical locations – such as meeting rooms – with presence information. But the possibilities for physical locales publishing their presence are really unbounded.
Imagine finding out where the closest empty parking space is through interaction with the parking garage’s ‘bot, or how busy your favorite restaurant is right now, or a snap shot of the number of cars on your commute home. By associating presence and availability information with these places, a simple and consistent interface can be exploited.
Groups and Projects – Obviously, people form groups as a matter of course, but the current notion of instant messaging buddy lists fall far short of what is needed for enterprise use. We can expect the automatic generation of groups from various sorts of analysis. Consider these examples:
- creating a small, on-the-fly team within a manufacturing company (including suppliers) to resolve a supply-chain bottleneck based on an analysis of availability, responsibility, and expertise of potential team members (as I described in Message 3(2));
- contrast that with the creation and maintenance of large, long-term, long-lived communities of interest, such as the tens of thousands of foreign exchange traders in the financial services community (as I discussed in Message 4(1)).
These two examples form two ends of a spectrum of online groups, the first potentially existing for a few minutes or hours, and the second persisting for decades.
Work gets done in groups, so aggregating individuals into groups is obvious; however, a group is more than just a collection of buddies. Groups should have their own identity, so that the current status and availability of the group can be accessed, as well. What information would be served up about groups through presence? The first would be the number and presence of its members, but other attributes might be just as interesting, like the status of the group’s activities (has the supply chain bottleneck been resolved?), associated documents, timeline of events, next steps, and the like.
If a group exists for a long time – like the foreign exchange group – the history of the group’s chat is potentially an enormously valuable asset: a knowledge base to be drawn upon. While it may seem strange to consider the availability of information – the sort of thing managed in FAQs or indexed information stores – accessed through specialized presence and availability presentation, I anticipate that this will emerge. In effect, this is rendering the hits resulting from a query on the information (perhaps through a ‘bot interface, but perhaps not) – in this case, the decades of stored chat associated with the foreign exchange group – as being ‘available’.
I put “available” in quotes above because it’s a stretch to say that the availability of information in this sense is really the same sort of thing as me being available to talk to you. However, the ease of use and simplicity of interaction in this way will make such an approach attractive.
…And its Costs
Presence and Privacy – When discussing ubiquitous presence, personal privacy immediately comes to the forefront. Do you want everyone in your company to know how much time you are spending at Starbucks? Clearly, there has to be a balance between corporate need and personal privacy. The rise of ubiquitous presence will create a commensurate requirement for significantly more sophisticated privacy controls, or presence filtering. The all-or-nothing, global presence and availability controls provided by today’s instant messaging solutions are already inadequate. What is needed for the enterprise is a complex series of presence and availability filters:
Presence Management – Today’s presence systems are unlikely to be able to scale up to the demands of the impending profusion of people, devices, projects, groups, and every other addressable entity connected and participating with the emerging worldwide presence network.
- Enterprise Privacy – Information about the functioning of online devices, project status, and the coming and going of employees within corporate buildings is clearly critical to the enterprise, but sufficient access controls must be put in place to guard against the misuse of this information, both relative to enterprise confidentiality and security, and personal privacy.
- Personal Privacy – Subordinated to some extent by corporate needs, individuals will require a broad spectrum of highly sophisticated controls around their presence and availability. The combination of presence (who can see my presence?), availability (who am I available for and when?), location (who can see my location and when?), and device (what device am I using?) and other elements of personal status will lead very rapidly to requirements for extremely sophisticated, complicated, and constantly changing presence filters.
Leaving aside the debate about peer-to-peer versus server-based instant messaging, in both cases every presence or availability change made will lead to messages being sent through the network, informing others who are subscribing through their buddy lists to that information. Even in the most efficient presence management systems, the explosion of presence information over the next few years will be enormous. Today, there are over 400 million registered users of public instant messaging solutions, and that number is likely to double or treble in the next few years, as more users come on line and existing users increase the number of devices they use for IM. As the trillions of computing devices, projects, packaged goods, refrigerators, thermostats, cameras, and other presence-producing items come online, we are likely to see serious presence bottlenecks. Slowing down the ‘ping cycle’ – the frequency of presence tests – is not a good idea, but there have to be some key technologies brought on line to meet this challenge.
There are two sides to the presence bottleneck: sending all the messages, and updating presence information, the latter being more complex than the former. Presence information is relatively small – even in a world where it may have to be encrypted for security purposes. But even so, the sheer volume of future presence will mean that obvious techniques for decreasing message traffic will need to be applied to presence: for example, aggregating all presence changes within one organization and passing that as a single block to an external organization, as opposed to sending thousands or tens of thousands of separate messages.
It's apropos to dig out this old piece that talks about ubiquitous presence -- for people, objects, devices, everything -- and the social impacts. Also the performance issue, since Twitter has recently experienced some growing pains as it tries to scale up to the hordes of people moving on board.
[By the way, I recall a recent conversation with the folks at Jabber Inc., who have reported really high performance numbers for their presence technology. It makes me wonder why people aren't basing these new technologies on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol? Or Jabber Inc's technology, directly? And at the same time, I recall all the conversations I had in past years with Jabber Inc about innovative product ideas that they couldn't be bothered to try. Everyone is stuck in their own blinders, I guess.]
The statement that "presence is the killer app" could still get me labeled as a madman, even four years after I first wrote it. But with the emergence of social presence and the opportunities for widespread deployment outside of the nerdly, early adopter end of the gene pool, the predictions I made would still be interesting at a San Francisco cocktail party, I think.
Dear Fellow Madman,
like you, I believe that this is not just about “instant messaging”, but unlike you, I'm baffled at how much thought is going into presence-enabling the “real world” and how little into enabling the web. Of the two, one would think that the first to get such a treatment would be the one with the least impedance mismatch... no?
Anyway, I spent most of 2006 on the latter (and yes, it uses XMPP).
Posted by: bard | March 09, 2007 at 01:08 PM
Hi
I am Javier, the founder of Trendirama.com, the fastest growing community of amateur writers writing about The Future of everything. We would like to invite you to join us and write an article on the website, perhaps "The future of presence, interfaces" or on whatever you are passionate about...
It is up to you, you choose the subject.
You would get a link back when you link to your own article, if you wish.
You can even re-use some of what you have here, in the last part of the article, "your view and comments". That would save you time and still be interesting for readers.
And yes, I know you may not have the time. Theoretically, none of us do...;)
Failing that, if you like the project and you can help us spread the word -even if you don't write- it would be great.
Since we are starting, any help is appreciated.
By making this valuable information available online for free, I truly believe we are helping to make the world a better place.
And you could do your bit for the world too, by sharing what you know, as we already do.
Please let us know if you link or mention us, so we can link you back too if you wish.
You can even use our valuable articles on your websites, provided that you link back. Any better offer than that?! :)
Look forward to hearing from you or reading your interesting article at Trendirama!
Best regards
Javier Marti
http://www.trendirama.com
Posted by: Javier Marti | March 09, 2007 at 09:46 PM
Hi Stowe -- i don't know how I missed this last month, or how I missed in '03, for that matter! Jevon's post at the FASTforward blog pointed me here.
Here's what I commented on his post:
radical social presence — (disclosure; I am part of www.connectbeam.com) this is at the core of connectbeam. Giving users outward-facing, self-updating profiles that reflect their search, bookmarking, tagging activities is a central feature of our software. Then, powering search itself (FAST, google, any enterprise search ultimately) to return search results that feature the ability to click to profiles that relate to the searcher’s goal.
Does this touch on the goals you talk about above?
Posted by: Tom Mandel | April 09, 2007 at 09:29 AM