Telepocalypse

Presence problems

Time for a rambling rant on the failures of presence.

I’ve just upgraded to Skype 1.1, which has the little pop-up presence indicators in the bottom right of your screen when buddies come online and offline.

I also have Yahoo! IM. Some people (like my parents) are on both. We use Yahoo! for the webcam and general IM, and Skype for talking.

But now I get a blizzard of presence notifications every time they come and go. Not what I want. Sounds like Windows should be doing the job, and mediating all the presence change notifications. Although Uncle Bill would no doubt claim that as I’ve got MSN Messenger bundled in for free, why would I want to use anything else…

Another problem I’ve got is that I have quite a long buddy list on Yahoo! IM. Many of these are readers. Much as I love you all, I really don’t need to know every time you reboot your PC. But IM programs don’t model this relationship well at all. I’m happy for everyone to see my presence and occasionally seek turds of wisdom from me. The reverse isn’t true; but I can’t turn off notification for selected individuals.

IM is a first-generation social networking tool that suffers much the same issues as the second-generation ones (Friendster, LinkedIn et al). Real social relationships vary across a spectrum from “let’s breed babies together” to pop fans, salesmen and spammers. Buddy lists don’t really encompass that well.

Since buddies are such a narrow social model, it’s a bit of a shame that Skype didn’t advance the art in the out-of-the-box product. Buy the genius of the APIs is that other people can. If you want a system to schedule inbound calls, someone else will build it for you. Prediction: Skype will make more money by selling access to APIs than they will from direct consumer revenues.

For an example of what presence in 2015 might look like, I’m sure there’s a ton of money in enabling people to feel the “presence” of a celebrity. How much would some people pay to see a real-time feed of Britney’s wristwatch heart-rate monitor? You don’t think this would happen? Just wait! You’ll pay to see a fuzzed-up image and scrambled sound of your idol’s kitchen, just to know they’re there and reachable. Privacy is a fungible commodity for sale.

I’ve just slapped a Yahoo! presence icon onto the Telepocalypse home page. But the disconnectedness of the whole presence system we have troubles me. I’ve no means of advertising it’s existence to you in a machine-readable format (unlike, say, the RSS feed of the site, which your reader will pick up automatically). It isn’t very extensible or semantic. There’s a world of improvement still to be made.

In the long run, VoIP is really a bit of a side show in IP communications. Sending a bidirectional audio stream over session controllers and firewalls is dull, yesterday’s news. It only gets all the attention because of the legacy PSTN charges and the fools’ goldrush to mine them. Identity and presence are the real stories.

This week we’ve seen the effective merger of the two biggest Stateside technogear shows: Comdex (the PC world) and CES (the Gizmo world). I wonder if in ten years from now we won’t have separate shows like VON and Digital ID World. There will be just two big shows, CES for consumers, and a “picks and shovels” supplier-fest for the components you need to be an IP revolutionary. I just hope someone by then will have fixed my presence problems, too.