Is presence simply an interruption in flow?
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:
- Presence should not be interruptive.
- Users must set/maintain their own presence information.
- Setting presence should be quick, simple, and easy.
- Presence should accommodate for a contact’s different phones.
- Presence should allow users to display different statuses to different groups.
- Mobile presence should include communication preference.
- Presence should include a universal visual/icon system for quick reference.
- Presence should allow connections to other mobile services.
- Presence information should be seen anywhere a contact is referenced in the mobile UI.
- Presence should be maintained by a non-carrier third party.
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
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Comments
Great essay Ken. I think one of the things that can help with interruption management as it relates to presence as well as the increasing number of siloed apps and services many of us are using is to factor in location.
If we can build rules, either overtly or by observed behavior, that document and govern how we prioritize service access when we're in different locations, we can add some intelligence to the system to help manage the interrupts.
GrandCentral provides a glimpse about what that might look like but it's not yet able to leverage my lat-long physical location to make decisions about routing incoming stuff to me and allowing me to control who sees me, and in what state.
If my mobile device could provide location info to a master service like GC, it could act as a rules manager to deliver incoming communications and information to the appropriate platform/device and flip the right switches to announce my availability (or lack thereof) via the presence component.
Location, combined with presence and attention, contributes to mastering the flow (or current). In the scenario I've been assembling as I think about these bits of data, when I arrive home, my mobile device (based on lat-long and perhaps a connection to my home WiFi access point for IP address) automatically flips a set of switches that routes incoming communications and data to a particular device (or set of devices), adjusts to the appropriate prioritization of "number ringing" (the GC piece), and changes my presence notification(s) on the services I use (Twitter, Skype, Gizmo, SightSpeed, etc.) accordingly.
To make this really work properly, it needs to also factor in data about my contacts and provide better control over who I show what presence availability to based on who they are and where they fit in my personal attention hierarchy. My wife and kids, for example, get my attention pretty much all the time. My boss and co-workers get much higher priority when I'm at the office or on the road and during business hours than they do when I'm home and in the evenings or on weekends.
It's only a rough conception at this point but does this make any sense at all?
Posted by: Marc Orchant | April 1, 2007 6:39 AM
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Marc. I think you're right on track. It's really how we find a method for building rules about ourselves. I think it's a combination of location based services, driven by GPS, and heuristics we don't have today. I think the next generation mobile device will be as much our personal rules engine as it is anything else.
I think we'll rely on that mobile device to "know" us - our state, our availability, our routines, our relationships - in ways current generation devices just don't. It will become our "interaction peripheral" of a new sort.
I've actually had a brain storm that I'm muddling through and hope to post up in the next few days. I've shifted my thinking a bit away from interruption management to a more apt analogy. I'm thinking about all the characteristics there are around network performance, blended with the basic concept of link state routing protocols.
The problem is how I communicate and share my personal link state. I have some more detailed thoughts and a visual I have to get out of my Moleskine and onto the screen.
Posted by: Ken Camp | April 1, 2007 10:24 AM