The future of presence

Rafe Needleman CNET

Published: 04 Mar 2005

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You may think you're on the leading edge of technology if you're a heavy email user, but email in its current form is an archaic communications medium. It's the big black rotary phone of your parents' house compared to the tiny mobile phone you carry with you today. And what is email's greatest weakness? No, not spam. Email lacks presence.

If you use instant messaging, you know the difference between old-fashioned email and the power of instant messaging. And it's not the speed. It's the fact that before you send an instant message, you have a very good idea if the person on the other end is there to receive it. This makes instant messages, or IMs, succeed when email fails. For example, if you want to see if Joe down the hall can join you for lunch, sending email is a bad idea because you don't know if Joe is at his desk to read the mail. Telephoning is intrusive. Walking down the hall would tear you away from the other tasks you're juggling. But with IM, first, you find out if Joe is either at his desk or already gone (so find another lunch date); second, you know that if he is there and you send him a note, he'll see it. There's no other medium like this.

Now this may not be news to you. But the concept of presence that's inherent to IM can also exist in other forms of communication. It isn't in too many places yet, but hopefully it soon will be.

Email
Some corporate products, such as Microsoft's Live Communications Server, begin to merge email and an IM-like presence, but as far as I know, there's no true presence-based email program available to consumers and small businesses. I've actually been berating email software vendors for a while for not creating an easy-to-use option that lets users see if the person who just sent them email is still around to receive a reply or a phone call or an IM.

There are interesting third-party solutions, though, that do this. For example, Convoq's ASAP allows you to embed a presence indicator in your email or on your Web site. ASAP is designed to help you set up online meetings, which is Convoq's main business, but communicating presence is a great feature on its own. Yahoo's online mail also has a presence indicator.

Of course, the big social challenge with email and presence would be managing privacy. I don't want every email I send out to signal my availability. But within my company and among my closest friends, it'd be useful. I'm still surprised there's no good standard way to do this.

Telephone calls
Caller ID is a small step towards bringing presence into mobile phones, and it shows, as does IM, that it has the value of transferring personal information before you start communicating in earnest. But caller ID doesn't go far enough. Aside from making a phone ring, there's no other way to signal the person you're calling that you want to talk, and more importantly, there's no way for that person to signal back if he or she doesn't.

A few companies are solving this problem. For example, SoloMio has something I call 'super caller ID'. Given the right technology on both the calling and the called phones, SoloMio allows the person receiving the call to send a quick text message back to the caller, such as, 'Sorry, I'm busy now,' or, 'I can't talk now but will call you in 10 minutes'. You can even have a quick text-based dialogue. For example, I call you, and my caller ID appears on your phone. You select a canned query in reply: 'Is it urgent?' I get a menu option to send back, 'Yes'. Then you pick up the phone. This functionality is available today on a few cellular networks.

More smart applications
Where else can we apply presence? If you start to think beyond simple person-to-person communications, the possibilities get really interesting. For example, start-up NetMesh is developing a platform that enables applications to be aware of the user's location and that also gives you information about the presence of people around the user. In a medical setting, for example, the system can automatically display the record of the nearest patient on a doctor's tablet computer, or in a group setting, it can ensure that all the medical personnel in a room are, by default, looking at data about the same patient.

Technology freed us, first from ploughs and, most recently, from our desks. But now that we can work anywhere, we can be awfully hard to find. It's time to start making technology smarter about presence. It could make our lives easier and our work more productive.

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