First, I'm going to fall on my sword and confess I've loaded and started using another new presence tool, Jaiku. If you read all the different things I write, you may have seen here that I had problems and wasn't overly impressed. I eat those words as I begin to think about presence a bit differently.

First, thanks to Stuart Henshall for giving me just what I needed to move off my stubborn ways and take the steps to get my technical issues with Jaiku resolved. I probably wouldn't have bothered if not for Stuart's thoughts on Jaiku on the N80.

Presence has multiple personalities today. Presence is a bad word. Presence is an infant. Those are suppositions that I'm just taking as reality in my view for the moment.

In the beginning, presence was the IM buddy list. That was the beginning. Presence was binary - online or offline. Then presence enhanced with some indicators that I was on the phone, or at lunch, or *gasp* invisible. The problem is that presence was tied to a specific IM platform (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, etc.). Yes, the various Jabber related clients managed some cross-system integration, but each IM system is truly it's own community of sorts. They never came together using a common standard.

I believe IM is dead. Yes, I use IM, but it's a technology destined for the Dead Media Project - a relic of the past. In part it's death is due to failure to come together using open standards. In part it's due to the mostly "thick client" problem of requiring multiple clients. In part it's due to the lousy job all the IM platforms have done at embracing mobility. Add all the factors together, and while Microsoft is rolling out LCS and OCS and pushing forward with enterprise efforts, IM is a dying service as we knew it in the past.

As technologies evolve, the question of thick client vs. thin client has been withus for quite some time. It dates back to the idea of a diskless workstation in earlier LAN technologies. In the Web 2.0 world, a thin client is a browser. A thick client requires some added software. And some services embrace multiple models. They have a browser interface, some use client software specific to the application, and some embrace other IM clients and technologies.

What struck me in my experimentation is that the real differentiators are user choices and the richness of the experience. I've used or investigated four different personal presence engines and each has great values and serious drawbacks. For the most part, the drawbacks are tied directly to where the broad service concept sits in its own maturity model. It's a very immature, infant technology really.

Twitter
Twitter is an interesting approach and one that's actually been around for quite a while now. I started using Twitter many months ago when it was Twttr. Originally it was an SMS broadcast mechanism. It allows friends to group together and share information about their status via an SMS message. It was great for friendly information sharing.

Twitter went viral slightly before the recent SXSW conference. Many technologists and industry thought leaders have been using Twitter for quite a while. Now Twitter gets news feeds, updates from individuals, notifications when blogs are updated, and all sorts of input. Input in 140 characters.

140 characters because SMS has limitations. For those who use Twitter a lot, it drives a very concise behavior. A new paradigm. If you can't say it in 140 characters, you don't say it there. We're becoming sound bites or finely tuned information in some cases. In other cases we're simply telling everyone we're eating pizza.

Twitter can be used via SMS, the web, and a few IM clients. The robustness of each has been impacted by growth pains as Twitter has gone viral in growth and popularity.

I use Twitter all the time. If you're interested you can see my info at http://twitter.com/kencamp

Twitter is a social network in 140 characters or less at a time.

iotum Talk-Now
iotum released a presence application for the Blackberry that's really oriented towards the business user or working group in my view. Talk-Now lets you share your availability information (different that Twitter) in realtime. It lets you see who among your contacts is available, elimnating phone tag. It can notify you when someone you want to talk to becomes available. it even lets you reach out to non-subscribers so they know you need to reach them.

It's a different facet of presence that's tightly coupled with the need to do business. I don't see Talk-Now as a social network, but as a business network. It facilitates ease of connecting.

If there's a drawback, it's that Talk-Now is purely a Blackberry solution. Today. Trust me, I know Alec and Howard and they aren't resting on their laurels. I'm confident we'll see huge advances in Talk-Now as it evolves to embrace a wide array of handhelds from Windows Mobile to Symbian, to J2ME solutions.

Talk-Now is a business communications facilitator.

Fring
Fring is an interesting hybrid tool that uses the mobile handset to incorporate some VoIP calling functions and IM capability between some IM systems. I struggle with some of the terminolgy used. They're one of several who tout VoIM - Voice over IM. But that's bogus really. IM is over IP, and VoIM is simply a VoIP variant. That's marketing buzzword bingo and doesn't add value to the conversation, but rather muddies it. Fring also says it's a thin client, then loads a thick client on your mobile handset. Any time you have to load sofware, it's a thick client, no matter how thin the developer thinks they wrote the code.

If I was to pin down a real problem with Fring, it's that most of the people I talk to use every solution supported, but let's just stick to Skype, GoogleTalk and MSN. When I fire up Fring, I can see that a friend is online in every system, but I can't tell which one I'm contacting them on unless their user name is different for each. Since I use kencamp almost everywhere, and others do much the same, the single icon indicating status is something I found totally confusing. Maybe that's an adaptation that doesn't matter, but some people who use multiple clients have a preferred method they like to use for contact. Fring doesn't let me know I'm using my friends' preferred contact method.

I've had good and bad experiences with Fring. I've used it some, but not reinstalled it since I upgrade the firmware in my N80i. Fring requires a Nokia 3G or Wi-Fi Symbian handset. Your friends don't have to have that, but you do to use it. Again, that's a maturity issue, not a long-term problem.

Jaiku
Jaiku is another type of presence engine. It allows you to build a contact list of friends. Somewhat like Twitter, it allows you to see your friends recent updates. Jaiku provides more information, richer information as well. It shows the status of your friends phone (as if you need to know I have mine set to the silent profile). It shows wheter or not they're signed in to Jaiku. It shows their location. Jaiku also supports the incorporation of multiple feeds. Blogs, Flickr photos, RSS feeds. Jaiku can even share your calendar if you like.

I admit I'm pretty new to using Jaiku, but if you want to see an example, I'm at  http://kencamp.jaiku.com/

It's About the User Experience
These presence tools are really all about the user experience, about mobility, and about the changing face of our communications.

First, we have the choice of thin client or thick client. Twitter as an SMS tool is universal and works simply. Twitter is perhaps the catalyst that makes SMS an accepted and embraced technology in the US, particularly among baby boomers. Younger generations have been more open to SMS in the US, but Twitter has a fairly dense boomer population. As a result, its bridged some generational gaps in small ways.

For me personally, and for many people I know, Twitter was the catalyst that signaled the death of IM. SMS has become my preferred IM tool, and it is for a large number of people. And while we're the technologists and a very miniscule percentage of the population at large, it's a measureable change. I know I now text message many people who wouldn't have considered using SMS six months or a year ago. Daily.

Aside: SMS has some other important implications in the event of emergencies. SMS messages may well be delivered in a major disaster when the cellular carriers are congested. Because of its short message nature, it is highly resilient. More on that in another post sometime.

SMS...text messaging is a thin client, or clientless tool. Nothing needs to be added. Every mobile phone sold today supports it. It's out of the box functionality. if there's a gap, it's in the linkage to computers. People who sit at computers working don't have easy access to SMS. The browser interface becomes the next simple link. And these two tools, coupled with services like Twitter and Jaiku provide complete communications, in 140 characters or less.

The thick client approach redefines the user experience. With a thick client, you get a richer experience with more information, more indicators, and perhaps nearer realtime.

I've read recently that some people don't think fixed mobile convergence will ever happen. I disagree. In many ways it already has. Again, it's an infant in the lifespan of the total maturity model, but for many of us, our mobile and PC are tightly integrated to our circles of friends and business contacts. Fixed mobile convergence is upon us, but only in the sense that we're now tasting what will come in the months ahead.

As iotum, Fring and Jaiku expand to support multiple mobile operating systems, with Twitter tied to the ubiquitous SMS capability of the telephone, we can see a path to real presence and collaboration on the mobile device. In our purse or pocket. With Fring and other solutions, we see the integration of VoIP over 3G wireless or WiFi on the handheld.

There are a lot of solutions out there as different innovators introduce different view of how the puzzle pieces will fit together. Are they evolutionary, revolutionary, or somewhere in between? I don't think it matters. What matters is that we're moving forward to new presence and collaboration models faster than many people think.



Technorati Tags: mobility, presence, VoIP, unified communications, Twitter, iotum, Talk-Now, Fring, Jaiku