Recently my friend Alec Saunders posted a piece, Couldn’t have said it better myself!, triggered by another post, Mobile Presence: The Essential Attributes from Jared Benson. Since then, Jim Courtney posted a follow up,Getting Presence Right II - A More Comprehensive Perspective, on Skype Journal.

Each piece is really emphasizing some thoughts on ten basic points. Each piece is noteworthy, readable and quite valid. It's not my intent to detract in any way from the points that Alec, Jared and Jim make. I agree with all of them.

Here are the ten basic points:

1. Presence should not be interruptive. 
2. Users must set/maintain their own presence information. 
3. Setting presence should be quick, simple, and easy. 
4. Presence should accommodate for a contact’s different phones. 
5. Presence should allow users to display different statuses to different groups. 
6. Mobile presence should include communication preference. 
7. Presence should include a universal visual/icon system for quick reference. 
8. Presence should allow connections to other mobile services. 
9. Presence information should be seen anywhere a contact is referenced in the mobile UI. 
10. Presence should be maintained by a non-carrier third party.

I count Alec as both a personal friend and a master of presence (along with Howard). But over the past few months, I've spoken to a number of people about presence, ranging from home users, to enterprise business people to industry players to investors. And I've got some differing thoughts. They aren't fully developed, but they carry some very consistent observations from my conversations.

Presence isn't understood or appreciated. For most of people, talking in these terms and has no relevance worth speaking of. It isn't sexy. It isn't a feature or a function. Presence is, at best, a state attribute with multiple dynamics.

When I look at the list above, it carries some connotations that are for me, and many people, problematic.

One theme that's clear above is that presence, as we talk about it today, is disruptive. Not a distruptive technology, but an interruptive one. It disrupts my work flow because it requires constant attention from me. It's analogous to a mood indicator, and for it to have any value, I must continually tweak it.

If I follow Stowe Boyd's thought on information flows and continuous partial attention, it's another interruption flow that I must constantly monitor and alter. And while this conversation focuses on presence as it relates to mobile devices, that too is problematic. I'd perhaps argue that Twitter is a presence engine, requiring continuous partial attention to be effective, always asking "What are you doing?" In a recent presentation, Stowe asked the question "Is attention a resource?" I don't think it is. I think attention's simply an attribute of where I am in a given current (what Stowe calls a flow).

I see the problem, if we think of it as a problem, not to be one of presence, and not to be one of continuous partial attention and multiple information flows. The root problem we're addressing is interruption management. Presence, as described above, is just a small facet of that.

The dichotomy is that when we think of presence this way, we use presence as yet another interruptor. It's another item requiring attention. And while these are leading edge thoughts on presence management. I think it's important to recognize that if presence has a maturity model, it's in its infancy and these are very raw, very immature aspects of the role presence will play in the larger need for interruption management.

When I look at the current state of what we call presence, and compare it with the current state of VoIP, my fear is that we'll spend too much time on presence and not evolve quickly enough to the larger need of interruption management.

I'm going to pay very close attention to Stowe and what he's thinking because I think he's on the right path for where we're headed in the next generation.


Technorati Tags: presence, attention, interruption management