Telepocalypse

Is anybody there?

Based on seeing many comments like this on “meta-presence”. Time to make a prediction.

This meta-presence phenomenon is where we annotate our presence with customer names or away messages. Various stories are emerging of innovative uses of these facilities. At a very mundane level, I currently have my location appended to my Skype user name.

I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, but “presence” looks like it’s going to evolve into a stream of XML documents that describe a whole slice of what is going on — and changing — in someone’s online and offline life. Call it “context”, if you will. The rudimentary presence we have today is but a tiny step. Much of the data in your “presence feed” may be encrypted and only those who you have armed with a decryption key will be able to access it. Your communications client will extract from the presence document the bits that are of most interest.

What’s important here is the de-coupling of the publication from the display. It is presumtious of the source of presence to decide in advance how the receiver will use it. A weakness of closed systems like Yahoo! IM, Skype, etc. is that they don’t make it easy to export and augment your presence. Your meta-message is hidden under a few layers of menu, not brought to the fore. It’s damned hard to put your Skype presence into a dynamic web page, although Yahoo make it easy.

The IM/talk networks have yet to fully embrace the idea of competing on the basis of richness of presence. We’re seeing some interesting pointers, though, such as MSN v7 showing what you’re listening to in your media player.

We’re also still waiting for an economic model emerge. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the concept of origination and termination fees for presence data start to emerge. This applies when there’s clear value being exchanged based on the direction of presence flow, and a means of constraining the path of that value exchange to force it through a toll booth. I don’t expect the presence data to be directly paid for by the end user. But a (premium content) dating site may import presence data to make dating into more of a real-time experience, for example. “Click here to call lovely Laura in London.” In this case, the presence networks pay the IM networks.

The potential for augmenting the calling experience per se is relatively constrained. But the richness of presence is almost unbounded, as is the value creation. I expect the economics of real-time communications to come to reflect that over time.

UPDATE: Here’s the story on workers using presence to flag their work availability.