Alec Saunders wrote a deep, thoughtful post the other day. Sometimes I hate it when he does that because I feel an urge to jump in, but can't find the time. Today I've worked on this response, and lost my work twice, so my frustration mounts.

To set the stage for this commentary, Alec's post brought some great insight from Brough Turner, another insightful guy. And in the back channel of email, yet another deep thinker, David Beckemeyer chimed in. There have been several others in the conversation as well, but these three drive my thoughts and response. It is important to note that these guys are real innovators and creators delivering real solutions in the marketplace. I am not. I'm a writer, an analyst, and an observer of the unified communications universe. The lens we view things through can vary mightily. And while we agree on every large and fundamental issue, we do, at times, differ in our viewpoints.

Alec started things with this:

“New Presence” and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto

Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. Today, callers have no way of knowing whether the party being called is available, or busy, or would consider the call an intrusion.

The Voice 2.0 Manifesto, October 2005

Today, we live in two extremes. It’s not uncommon for some of us to be talking on the phone, while being pinged on Skype, with multiple IM sessions running. In the middle of it all, the mobile phone will start ringing. Or, the converse is true and we shut down all communications for some peace and quiet.

Life isn’t black and white. It’s shades of grey. We need solutions for managing those shades, rather than the black and white solutions we have in today’s first generation presence systems. The solution is an evolution of today’s crude presence technologies into an architecture which I’ve described as New Presence.

Today’s Presence is an Unfulfilled Promise

The Voice 2.0 Manifesto is “all about me” — my applications, my identity, my availability. Users are in control. Developers bring new value directly to users with innovative applications that exploit the platform assets of identity, presence, and call control. It’s not about the network anymore. It’s about connecting people, and enabling conversations to occur.

When the Voice 2.0 Manifesto was written, it identified presence as the enabler of conversation, allowing parties to easily determine each others willingness to engage, and by which technology. Presence, today, remains an unfulfilled promise despite the numbers of writers touting it as the future of communications for the better part of three decades now.

If anyone knows how to frame their entry into a conversation, it's Alec. He excels and opening the dialog.

Most of us will agree that presence is an unfulfilled promise. But there's hope. Time magazine named YOU person of the year. And Alec rightly recognizes that the next generation of unified communications services is all about YOU too. YOUR applications, YOUR identity, and YOUR availability. Alec says it all - Users are in control. We're all trapped in the shades of gray that are communications solutions.

I knew this would be more than just a hat tip when Alec said "Cultural and technical barriers are the root of the problem."  I'll agree wholeheartedly to cultural problems, really a socialization issue. Alec works where the rubber meets the road here, so I'm sure he sees genuine technical problems. I sat Pfffft. They are minutia and a mere distraction. More on that later.

At this point, if you have not, go read Alec's complete post. You'll be lost if you don't. He goes on to introduve the model for what he calls New Presence. He uses a phrase in a visual "Integrated Conversation Web." It's all about relationships, context information, and profile management. We need these concepts for framing the technical problem. It's background.

Alec forecasts the demise of the "walled garden" and I can only say, damn right. Pfffft to carriers. Pfffft to portal players. Pfffft Verizon, SBC, Qwest and your ilk. Pfffft to you all. You do not serve our needs, and the new network is all about Time magazine's person of the year...us.

In a turn of phrase that's pure genius, Alec calls applications the "Value Creators" and he's never been more right.

• Call Management Applications
• Opt-in Advertising Systems (please hit advertisers in the head with a clue-by-four)
• Enterprise Applications
• Mashup Driven Web Applications (I'd go further and call these user-created click-to-converge applications. They're created in ad hoc mode on the fly, as they're thought up)

Content is not king. It never was, even though mainstream media keeps trying to sell that fairy tale. You do not control your product. You don't control your software. You don't control your hardware. I can hear Rod Serling's voice saying "we are in control." It's not the Twilight Zone, it's the User Zone. You can build it. They will indeed come. But when they get there...they're going to twist and bend your solution to their will and make it do what they want. Get used to it.

In closing, Alec identifies two problems, simple confusion around protocol standards (I say Pfffft) and the will of the carriers and portal players (Pfffft to them yet again). I knew this would lead to conversation more than just agreement.

Brough responded with this:

Why not call "new presence" availability?

Alec Saunders has just published an excellent article on the future of presence.  If you follow VoIP, this is the Saunders who brought us the Voice 2.0 Manifesto (October 2005).  I highly recommend Alec's current essay on the "new presence," but I have some thoughts, of course :-)

Can't we change the name?  With my mobile phone on my person I am always "present" but I may not be available.  Alec's essay covers these concepts, but why not suggest a new name?  something around the word "availability" would be good.

I want a communications interface that helps me capture my preferences.  When I receive a call on my mobile, there's a one-click way to capture the caller ID into a phone book entry.  I need comparable (and better) help in creating and maintaining profiles.  If, in a particular circumstance, I decline a call from a specific caller, the phone should recognize this behavior and ask me "Do you always want to send this caller to voice mail when your phone is in vibrate mode?"  and so on.

His post really digs deeper into the meat of the real problem. He thinks availability might be a good name. I'll disagree here too, but I like the way he's thinking. Here's what he said that made me step back and think a bit more:

And there's one place where I disagree with Alec.  I'm not worried about the proliferation of standards and semi-closed networks.  Just as Skype came on the scene with a proprietary system that "just worked" I expect someone to solve the "availability" problem without waiting for standards or heterogeneous networks.  I already run four instant messaging clients on my laptop.  A single client would be nice, but it's not that important.  Once we finally learn how availability should work from an existing player like Skype or from an entirely new overlay network (as Skype was a few years ago), then we can worry about consolidation.

I have a slightly variant, some would say deviant, view. I don't really care about multiple clients, but I want whatever I use to work on whatever platform I have in hand at the moment. I want something that works across PC, Mac, Nokia, Treo, Blackberry, Linux, you name it. I don't want my communications tethered to some manufacturer's device or vendor's operating system. Period. I don't care if they wrap it in SIP, find interoprable standards, or draw it as a cloud that says "magic happens here." As a user, I don't give a rabbit's fart how it works. I only care that it does.  Period.

Bright guy David Beckemeyer mentioned in email that at Earthlink they had bandied about the phrase "rich presence" for a time. He also brings some real clarity into the willingness to engage compared to the desire to be interrupted and the garbage-in/garbage-out syndrome that's likely to follow. As always, David skewers the issue in a simple sentence - "Ultimately interaction is a NEGOTIATION."  Ok, stick a fork in it. We're done. That's the root of things...negotiation. But it's less a technological negotiation than a human one.

I've thought about some words and phrases a lot the last six weeks or so - presence, relevance, context. These are words that are near and dear to my friend Alec. He and I chat and trade email, but he's going to read this, like you, with no prior warning. So why the title I chose for this post - The Absence of Presence? Alec and Howard and the iotum team are thought leaders in this whole field. Like I said, they're delivering real solutions. But I have a different view from the sidelines.

Presence isn't relevant. Context isn't relevant. Relevance isn't relevant

Let's go to the dictionary.

rel·e·vant     /ˈrɛləvənt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[rel-uh-vuhnt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–adjective

bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand; pertinent: a relevant remark.

---

I think the problem extends in to other areas. Investors, the venture capital folks, also don't really understand what we mean by presence, availability, context and relevance. They smell something off in the distance, but they can't quite touch it. They can't see users reaching for it. They can't vizualize a money trail. So I think they're challenged to reach for the gold ring. They want assurances, and the whole concept isn't unculcated into every business person's daily life at a level that can provide any assurance.

The unidentified obstacle ahead on the road to presence, availability, context and relevance in these terms, may well be Cisco. They're tossing so much marketing money and horsepower at Telepresence that very quickly, enterprise customers are going to mentally make a Cisco connection to a very different solution.

The problem isn't with the concept. The concept is sound. The problem is with the words. I suggest we abandon them all and start fresh. There's no benefit in continuing on a path that hasn't been thoroughly evangelized, isn't filled with latent demand to fuel a revenue stream, and has an 800 pound gorilla obfuscating the situation.

I'm sort of inside the industry, and I definitely want to get my mojo on with presence, availability, relevance and context philosophically.  But I wouldn't take a job as a marketing manager promoting it. And I sure wouldn't take a job as a sales manager making quota from it. It's not an enterprise initiative, and not likely to be one any time soon.


Call it mojo. Call it karma. Call it my Web 2.0 Aura if you like. My fear is that until a spin doctor steps in a really steps it up a notch, we'll continue to flail around the absence of presence.


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