Basic instincts

What an interesting statement issued here after yet another superficial interpretation of the well known and long identified dual model for IT applications distribution.

At present, there is no one company covering these issues comprehensively. Microsoft must build scalable presence, Google must build trust. At Jabber, Inc. we're watching this looming battle with the inherent interest of an arms dealer.

The author is by the way Jabber Inc's public relations person. The actual issues referred to in the post are

• The inherent need for a high trust level that must come associated with any application service provider.
• The scalability of the distribution system's architecture to support the service.

I somewhat agree that presence is called to play an increasing role in many upcoming applications, be they used in an ASP or edge model. But this is certainly not the unique constraint that one needs to consider for building a successful ASP infrastructure. Generic reliability, graceful degraded functions, high availability and self healing are just a few of the basic needs for a proper scaling architecture. Real time oriented data services will certainly also play a role. In that respect, Google probably has an edge.
On the other front, I am not certain any of the two contenders can pretend to inspire a sufficient trust level. But, contrary to infrastructure, this is not a technical matter.

To conclude, although I have unfortunately observed several times that many in the PR world often associate “public” with “dummies”, I find rather curious to compare carrots (the illusive trust level of a corporation) and apples (the forbidden fruit of seamless scalability). More interestingly, I am wondering if the author is not falling into that category of people spending 5 months of their year's time in front of a television or a computer. Beyond the natural mental mimetism which results from trying to penetrate DoD contractors defenses and sell them presence, too much exposure to WoW, "GI Jane", [insert here any other B TV series, video game or reality show] is the only rational explanation I could find to why the inherent interests of this company should be those of an "arms dealer" when the context is "live" services…

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Presence, Antecipate

Translating between otherwise incompatible networks

This is the most common definition given of a gateway in the telecommunication context:

A gateway is node that translates between two otherwise incompatible networks or network segments. Gateways perform code and protocol conversion to facilitate traffic between different architectures.

On the ground of this definition, the application that IBM has built on its Websphere J2EE server for Sametime is effectively a gateway. For that exact same reason, I believe that a very substantial leap of faith is required to envisage that it could lead to a multi-protocol presence server.
Fom the information available, the gateway is an application build on the JSR-000116 SIP Servlet API. It is in its way following a similar architecture of what IBM tout as the Websphere Presence Server. The SIP Servlet API is an attempt at leveraging developers' knowledge of HTTP web containers and extending it to SIP. On paper this is a sensible idea. In practice it has a few drawbacks.

• First, it is entirely based on the SIP protocol, which means that applications built on top of this technology will be SIP applications. As such, the SIP servlets are designed to process SIP requests and return SIP responses.
  That somewhat restrict the scope, as each network protocol has very specific characteristics which are rarely though of as "universal". Moreover, not every presence protocol uses a request/response paradigm in the way SIP does. XMPP for example uses simple notification packets to signal modification in presence sates, without requiring these packets to be answered.  In that respect, it becomes more difficult to mold XMPP into a servlet paradigm in the way it was possible with SIP. Consequently, the advantages expected from a common programming paradigm become somewhat blurred.
• Second, it relies on a J2EE server to run. One can argue that it is a proven robust architecture. I would simply say that J2EE servers were not invented to provide solutions to real-time communications problems, but rather to bring solution to transactional application problems in the enterprise. The table herewith summarizes the differences between the two contexts.

All in all, if the IBM gateway had been implemented using a more appropriate application server such as a JSR 22 JAIN SLEE API implementation, I would have been tempted to take the leap of faith. Unfortunately, this gateway architecture prohibits any use beyond bridging between SIP and other protocols. To be fair, the same inability applies to the equally shortsighted approach taken by Jabber Inc. A solution that only sees the world through the eyes of a particular protocol will always leave us far from what is necessary to build a multi-protocol presence server. For the simple reason presence encompasses more than just protocols…

Technorati Tags: XMPP, SIP, Presence, Antecipate

Ready for personal presence solutions?

Mike Gotta had a dream: a presence aggregator service on every Windows workstation. If Microsoft could execute on this excellent idea, this would bring them back to the forefront of the individual applications scene.

As in most disruptive changes, the issue will certainly not come from the technology side. What Mike calls a "headless presence client aggregator" is nothing more than a publish/subscribe broker where address handles are used as topics... I think that technically, it can be implemented in no time. If this service is aggregating presence information at a client level, the required processing power and memory footprint can be kept very low. A documented API would allow both applications and "watcher" clients to subscribe or publish information to the common presence aggregator, ending up in a fully layered architecture that could benefit any application running on the workstation. The secret here would be to keep it simple.

The unknown lies in the incontrollable urge Microsoft always exhibit to "control the world" when adding feature to its flagship products. For this aggregator to succeed, it would have to be open…

• If this presence aggregator imposes a particular communication protocol, such as the RTC flavor of SIP/SIMPLE, then the adoption would be severely impaired. On the contrary, if the aggregator is open to other communication protocols, and provide by default both an RTC and an XMPP transport, Microsoft would be sending a very strong signal to the industry.
• If the rivalries between different Microsoft line of products were ironed out and they agreed to use this service rather than creating their own version of a presence aggregator, they would certainly be sending a strong trust signal to their user base. And as the API would be publicly documented they would not be accused of creating an unfair advantage for themselves.

In the end, there are many "if" for a somewhat obvious and rational solution. This period of the year is always full of dreams and whishes. In this case, I am certain the model would work, but would Micosoft be rational and open?

Technorati Tags: Presence, Antecipate

Maps of every country unite!

Some time ago, I was researching XMPP presence indicators that could be embedded into a web or blog page. This is how I came across Jobble, a Google maps and XMPP presence mashup. I knew of other similar services, such as Jabber World Map, Jabber Google Map and Talk Maps. They all provide the same kind of information: a map with the presence state representation of online XMPP users. For some reason, I prefer the way the Jobble site presents the information. But it is only a matter of taste.

As I was toying with these different services, it appeared to me that they were used by different demographics, which were themselves geographically concentrated. For example, Jobble, which is a Polish project, has a vast majority of subscribers from north-eastern Europe. The same applies to Jabber World Map which is coming from the Netherlands. Talk Maps has a slight majority of users in Europe, but overall users are thinly spread. Curiously, north-american users don't seem to fancy this kind of service…
My second observation was that those of my contacts using these services were scattered on several separate maps. I would have liked to have them on the same map instead. This is how I thought of federating XMPP maps.

Putting people on a map is a way to make them feel closer, and somehow participate in a feeling of community. But when these communities do not intersect, the chances to communicate and establish new relationships remain low. I have discussed earlier why a closed community would ultimately be less sticky than an open one, and looking carefully at these services shows they somehow act as closed communities. I think that the choice of registering to a particular map service must only be governed by the features that can be derived from the user presence, and not from the presence collection itself. For example, someone may prefer the way Jabber World Map show online users when the mouse hovers above a symbol, other the traditional point and click approach of Google Maps found in Talk Maps. Furthermore, someone may want to develop a similar service using Yahoo flash based maps, to be able to add some overlays.

Unfortunately, the ways these services are implemented today only lead to a walled garden result. Each service is built around its own data store and does not communicate with the rest of the world. Furthermore, they only allow static geo-location mapping, leaving out mobile devices or traveling users. Thinking of it, it is not that difficult to modify these services and turn them into distributed geo-location providers. The base features I would expect of such services are summarized bellow:

• Single registration and management point. The options chosen for my geo-location information using a particular service may become available to other similar services without forcing me to register with each of them individually.
• Static and dynamic geo-location data support. I want to be able to specify either static longitude and latitude values for a fixed workstation, or have the service pick up this information dynamically from a particular client.
• Privacy and information propagation control. It may look strange to mention privacy amongst the expected features, as putting one's presence on a map is already revealing a lot. But I would expect the service to provide a way to control the propagation of these data outside the service through an appropriate combination of white and black lists.

Looking at possible implementation options, I believe we have to keep the current approach which exposes the service through a presence enabled bot. It has the immense advantage of being well understood by the average user.
As a first step, the bot would need to be modified to understand the Personal Eventing (PEP) extension notifications. This will cater for dynamic geo-location updates. As PEP implementation progress, the service will automatically get access to dynamic geo-location information as they are set on the end user device, and will be able to display it on the map along with the user's static data.  From an end user standpoint, this would also simplify the fine grain tuning of which piece of information is made available to the service directly at the PEP level.
The bot could also be adapted to support PEP subscriptions. This would be appropriate in case the user's home server or the user profile does not allow an automatic subscription to PEP when someone subscribes to the user's presence information.
Finally, the service itself would have to expose a user geo-location node as specified by the publish/subscribe XMPP extension.  It would not be necessary to implement a full fledged publish/subscribe service, but rather make the service understand only the appropriate subset dealing with the http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc namespace. Another map service interested to get geo-location information would then subscribe to this node and receive any published modification.

<message from= "map.montague.net" to="map.capulet.com">
  <event xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#event">
    <items node="n48ad4fj78zn38st734">
      <item id="a1s2d3f4g5h6bjeh936">
        <geoloc xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc" xml:lang="en">
          <country>Italy</country>
          <locality>Verona</locality>
          <lat>45.44</lat>
          <lon>10.996</lon>
        </geoloc>
      </item>
    </items>
  </event>
  <addresses xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/address">
    <address type="replyto" jid="romeo@montague.net/orchard"/>
  </addresses>
</message>

Another possible approach would be to make the service itself support presence subscriptions and have the geo-location information implemented in a PEP node.  This way the relationship between two map services would be entirely presence driven, enabling added control through presence states. For example, there would not be notification toward a service which does not appear available. This is important in period of maintenance, or can be used as a way to throttle down heavy traffic. Presence would also be used to propagate end user's availability states.

<presence from= "map.montague.net" to="map.capulet.com">
  <show>away</show>
  <addresses xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/address'>
    <address type="replyto" jid="romeo@montague.net/orchard">
  </addresses>
</presence>

The end result would be a distributed geo-location information aggregation that could be leveraged through a standard and open protocol. Several local aggregators could be built by geographically close communities, but see their reach extended to the Internet as a whole because of the distributed design. From an end user stand point, there is not lock in, as it is possible to choose a service on the feature set offered and move to another service implementation without being forced to use yet another address handle. The combination of service based and PEP based filters would ensure a good level of privacy control.  And in the end my presence and geo-location information as seen by Jobble will be reflected on as Jabber World Map, Jabber Google Map and Talk Maps without forcing me to add a bot in my contact list for each different service.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Presence, Geo Location, Publish subscribe, Social network, Antecipate

Sensing activities in MUC

I have discussed before why conversation spaces are not places themselves, but rather for people to make places in them. In physical places as well as virtual ones, adaptation and appropriation of the associated technology by users is a critical element in the emergence of a sense of place and appropriate behavior. In short, the sense of place cannot be inherent in the system itself.

Within a place, social navigation is navigation through information collections on the basis of information derived from the activity of others. In the real world, we act where we are. We talk to people around us, because voices can only be heard at a short distance; we get closer to things to view them clearly. Understanding proximity helps us relate people to activities and to each other. When we see a group gathered around a meeting table, we understand something about this peoples' activity, and we know that another person standing off to one side is likely to be less involved.

Just like in real life, place aware presence systems should allow users to move to areas where others are clustered, to join the crowd and see what's going on. Since actions and interactions fall off with distance, so distance can be used to partition activities and the extent of interaction. I have described here how the use of "social proxies" can be used as abstract artifact to induce additional social information. Amongst the "social proxies" that have been studied, I find the Bable experiments particularly interesting as it could be applied to multi user conversations, such as the MUC rooms available on many XMPP servers. The proxy's role is to provide cues about the presence and activity of participants in the current conversation. It is graphically represented by two concentric circles similar to the drawing herewith. The outer circle symbolizes the conversation room border, the inner circle the conversation subject. Every participant is represented by a colored dot. The way it works is that participants in a particular room are shown within the proxy outer circle. People in other rooms are positioned outside the circle. When people are active in the conversation, meaning they either "talk" or "listen", then their dots move towards the inner circle, and then gradually drift back out to the edge when their activity decreases. What is interesting is the way test users have reported their experience of using this type of proxy:

…our users report the social proxy is engaging and informative. They speak of seeing who is "in the room," noticing a crowd "gathering" or "dispersing," and seeing that people are "paying attention" to what they say (when other dots move into the center of the proxy after they post).

On the practical implementation side, XMPP provides a number of extensions that can be put to use to enhance existing MUC implementations to support this type of social proxy. Beyond the specificity of the social proxy, the expected enhancement falls under what I have been writing about as presence feedback.

• XEP-0085 associated with message stanzas moving averages over time calculated at the MUC room level could provide sensible indications about the "talking" activity of every participant. A "listening" activity indication could be derived from the automatic presence status generated by the client.
  
• XEP-0163 could be used at the MUC room level to notify the MUC clients of each participant's dots relative position changes to be displayed on the client interface. If we limit the proxy geometry to a Cartesian representation, we could easily derive an appropriate format for the associated data similar to the Geo Location XEP.
  
• Other MUC rooms' global activity could also be provided to further accentuate the overall places context. Obviously, the notion of proximity could also be put to use to induce the notion of semantically related room discussion contexts.

In the end, I believe it is not overly difficult to assemble all these XMPP extensions together in a MUC implementation and, as a result, give a better sense of other people's presence and the ongoing awareness of activity into the conversation space. All in all it would be an interesting step toward better structuring our activity in the rooms, and better integrating communication and collaboration.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Conversation space, Presence, Antecipate

Visibility, Awareness, and Accountability

I have already presented the concept of "social translucence" while discussing the benefit of adding "place" based information to presence for a better regulation of mediated communications. A "socially translucent" system enhances two important dimensions of communications. First, by making social information visible it enables participants to be aware of what is happening, and to be held accountable for their actions as a consequence of public knowledge of that awareness. Second, the fact that the real world is translucent to social information, and that people have a sophisticated understanding of the consequences of the visibility of their social interactions helps structuring interactions in a mediated communication.

While the "social translucence" perspective is unique, it is not the only concept to be concerned with making the activities of communication systems' users visible to others. Since ten years, a considerable research work has been targeted at video-mediated communication (Finn et al., 1997), and has led to the concept of "awareness". A number of researchers have constructed systems attempting in various ways to provide cues about the presence and activity of their users (Benford et al., 1994). These researches have highlighted three design approaches to representing social cues in a digital system: the realist, the mimetic, and the abstract.

• The realist approach tries to project social information from the physical domain into or through the digital domain. This work is exemplified in teleconferencing systems and media space research.
• The mimetic approach tries to reproduce social cues from the real world as literally as possible in the digital domain. The mimetic approach is exemplified by graphical games and virtual reality systems. It uses virtual environments and avatars to mimic the real world.
• The abstract approach involves portraying social information in ways that are not closely tied to their physical analogs. It could uses abstract sonic cues to indicate social activity, or abstract visual representations. This approach also includes the use of text or simple graphics to convey social information.

Large deployment and adoption of systems based on the realist or mimetic approaches have faced substantial pragmatic hurdles, such as their cost, the required infrastructure, and the constraints of users support. On the other hand, I believe that the abstract approach has not received sufficient attention, particularly with respect to graphical representations. Text and simple graphics have many powerful characteristics: they are easy to produce and manipulate; they persist over time, leaving interpretable traces; and they enable the use of technologies such as search and visualization engines. In this last category we find "social proxies" such as those depicted here.

A social proxy is an abstract dynamic graphical representation that portrays socially salient information about the presence and activities of a group of people participating in an online interaction. It is one technique for providing online, multi-user systems with some of the cues so prevalent in the face to face world. Social proxies are intended to be visible to all those portrayed in them, thus providing a common ground from which users can draw inferences about other individuals, or the about the group as a whole.

Typically, a social proxy shows participants in a particular "place", as well as some of their activities in that "place". The choice of which aspects of activity are visible, and which remain private, depend on the particular context. Social proxies have four basic characteristics:

• A social proxy typically consists of two components: a large geometric shape with an inside and an outside that represent the online "place", and much smaller shapes positioned relative to the larger shape that represent participants.
• The presence and activities of participants in an online "place" are represented by the location and movement of the smaller shapes relative to the larger one. The relationships and movements of the visual elements have a metaphoric correspondence to the position and movement of peoples in a similar face-to-face situation.
• Social proxies are public representations, and everyone looking at a social proxy for a given "place" sees the same thing. It is not possible for participants to customize their views of a social proxy. This is important because I know that if I see something in the social proxy all other participants can see it as well. This is what supports mutual awareness and accountability.
• Social proxies are represented from a third-person perspective. Looking at a social proxy, every participant sees itself represented in it in the same way other participants are represented. This enables learning. A participant can see how its actions are reflected in its personal representation, and thus begin to make inferences about the activities of others.

The shared nature of a “social proxy” is critical. The knowledge that activity depicted in the social proxy is visible to all participants makes it “public”, and transforms it into a resource for the paticipants. It is this visibility that supports people accountability for their actions, and underlies the social phenomena, such as feelings of obligation, peer pressure, and imitation, that enable coherence in groups interactions.

On the Internet we are socially blind, and our attempts to communicate are often awkward. Even when others are clearly present, as in a chat room or on a conference call, it is difficult to see who is present, who is paying attention, or who wishes to speak. Things that require little effort in real world "places", such as taking turns when speaking; noticing when someone has a question; seeing who is responding to whom, require a lot of effort in online "places", when they at all are possible. I think introducing "social proxies" in widely used presence enabled applications, such as IM or VoIP clients, would allow us to progress on the way of a better sensitivity to the actions and interactions of those around us in virtual "places".

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Social network, Antecipate

Presence and going places

Mike Gotta has jotted down a series of notes about his trend of thoughts regarding presence technologies. In my opinion, his segmenting of the subject strongly reflects the constraints of an analyst work, but he nevertheless brings up many interesting points. I like in particular the way he widens up the scope of the reflection beyond current implementations

... food for thought and for consideration as to how some of these items relate to assumptions currently made around presence systems. How many assumptions based on instant messaging, IP telephony and so on will get in the way of a more expansive view of presence?

From his points, I would like to focus on presence relations to "location", "environment", "activity" and "role", what is often refered to as parts of a context. In that respect, because of their strong relationship to the physical reality, the use of spatial metaphors and spatial organization to model context have been favored by many mediated communication and collaboration systems. I believe this approach does not properly capture the complexity of real human social interactions. In real life, we are located in "space", but we act in "places". If the structure of a world is spatial, by comparison a “place” is a space invested with social meaning, such as behavioral appropriateness or cultural expectations. Furthermore "places" are valued "spaces". The distinction is like between house and home: a house is where we shelter, but a home is where we live. In order to get contextualy closer to the complexity of social communications, integrating “place” based information would greatly improve presence technologies.

Presence technologies make applications augments physical reality rather than replaces physical reality. Current implementations fall short in adapting to the vast variety of social communications contexts any human being is experiencing in real life. For example, the nature of relations and interactions with one's friends and family differs significantly from the nature of relations and interactions in the workplace. Even these simple differences are only superficially addressed by today's presence enabled applications. As a matter of illustration, we can cite:

• The way of establishing trusted presence relations scales poorly. To establish individual full trust between 10 persons, 10×9/2=45 bilateral agreements need to be established. Trust groups would scale much better and be easier to manage.
• The availability status does not provide much added value. Many community systems provide a list of who is on to the community website, using a group-based trust model where presence information not only indicates "who is online" but also "who is here". This model may work well when using a community’s website as primary shared resource. However, many groups and communities in workplaces often use a variety of shared resources. In such cases, for example when co-workers are always online at the same time, more detailed presence information than just online/offline status is needed.
• The trust model is very crude. Either one establishes a trust relation and can always observe other's presence information, or one does not establish a trust relation, in which case one can never other's presence information and cannot engage in conversations. This might not be problematic when dealing with friends and family, with whom you expect to resolve unwanted interruptions easily. It becomes a problem when dealing with a larger set of co-workers in a multi-project environment.

Presence technologies need to be augmented to provide information not only about people but also about “places”. Unlike what is currently offered in IM and VoIP applications, more advanced presence mechanisms must allow exchange of information only with a certain subset of people, not always but sometimes only, depending on real-time context information that can be derived from the virtual or real “places” people visit. Today, ordinary presence systems only give answers about person oriented questions:

• Who is online, or is this person online?
• What is this person doing?

Advanced presence systems will have to provide answers and notifications about “place” oriented questions, such as:

• Who is here?
• Who is near?
• Where is that person?
• What is that person doing there?

It happens these questions can be answered by combining different scoped attributes of presence infomation, including the trust relation between parties, their real or virtual locations, activities at these locations and presence and awareness scopes.

Trust scope. Some presence systems allow anyone who has access to a presence server to see presence information of others, other systems are more restrictive. The establishment of trust is distinguished by four model aspects:

• Opt-in / opt-out / managed: In an opt-in trust model, others can only see presence information if you explicitly give them permission. In an opt-out model, others can see presence information, unless you explicitly denied them permission. In a managed model, a third party instead of the users determines who can see presence information.
• Individual / group: In a individual trust model, each person rights to presence information are managed separately. In a group trust model, rights to see presence information are managed for an entire group.
• Reciprocal / non-reciprocal: In a reciprocal trust model, if A has the rights to presence information of B, then B also have the rights to the presence information of A. In a non-reciprocal trust model, this may not be the case.
• Permanent / blockable / contextual: In a permanent trust model, presence information is available as long as the rights to do so exist. In a blockable trust model, presence information can temporarily be denied. If the rights to presence information are based on location or place the trust model is contextual.

Location scope and virtual distance. When users browse the web, edit files from a shared storage, or read or post in blogs, they are present at a "location" in cyberspace. That said, many characteristics of physical space, such as being aware of someone's presence, and being able to initiate contact and communicate with that person, do not necessarily exists in the cyberspace.
Location information is expressed by coordinates, but in cyberspace unlike in the real world, users can be at multiple coordinates simultaneously. Place-based presence systems need to answer the question "Who is near?", have to calculate virtual distance between these coordinates. Virtual distance is then used to determine who can and who cannot be seen. To calculate virtual distance, presence location coordinates need to be laid out in a space, such as topology, virtual world or any directed graph. In place-based presence systems, location information constitutes a primary form of presence information. Not only the fact that someone is online somewhere in cyberspace, but also which resource that person is accessing provides presence information that can be made available to trusted parties.

Presence scope. A presence scope specifies the maximum virtual distance at which a trusted party can watch presence information. One may use multiple presence scopes, e.g., "people on the same website can see me, but cannot see the page I am on" and "people on the same web page can see if I am focusing on that page".

Awareness Scope. An awareness scope specifies the maximum virtual distance at which a user wants to get notified of presence information of trusting parties. One may use multiple awareness scopes, e.g., "are there people with me on the same web page?" and "are people with me on the same web page focusing on the page?".

Activity scope. What a user is doing at a location is also presence information. For example, in addition to browsing a web page, this may involve whether the user is actually focusing on this page or not , whether the user is editing this page or not.

Ultimately, by relaying “place” based information, presence technologies will enable three important building blocks of social interaction-- visibility, awareness, and accountability-and thus become "socially translucent" systems. We can illustrate a "socially translucent" system by the following example. Consider a door with a design problem, which is likely to slam into anyone about to enter from the other direction when opened quickly. An attempt to fix this problem would be to place a "Please open slowly" sign on the door. As one might guess, the sign is not a particularly effective solution. But we could also put a glass window in the door. As people approach the door they see whether anyone is on the other side and, if so, they modulate their actions appropriately. The sign is no longer required. While this solution works, it is useful to examine the reasons for the effectiveness of the glass window:

• Firstly, the glass window makes visible socially significant information. As humans, we notice and react to movement and human faces and figures more quickly than we notice and interpret a printed sign.
• Secondly, the glass window supports awareness. One does not open the door quickly because one knows that someone is on the other side. Our social rules come into play to govern our actions, as we have been raised not to slam doors into other people.
• Lastly, there is another subtler reason. Even if one does not care about hurting others, one will nevertheless open the door slowly because one knows that the other knows that one knows it is there, and therefore one will be held accountable for its actions. While awareness and accountability usually occur together in the physical world, they do not necessarily in a virtual context. It is through such individual feelings of accountability that norms, rules, and customs become effective social control mechanisms.

Note that "social translucence" is not only about acting according to social rules, but more about facilitating different types of communication and collaboration. Using presence information it is today possible to observe that another party is likely to be available for communication. In return for giving up some privacy, the other party expects to be contacted at suitable moments, can screen incoming messages, can plausibly deny being present by not responding or responding later, or simply by initiating the conversation at a time of its choosing. With "socially translucent" presence technologies it becomes easier for users to have coherent discussions, to observe and imitate others' actions, to engage in peer pressure, to create, notice, and conform to social conventions.

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Social network, Antecipate

Down with the phone number tyranny

Martin Geddes is the last amongst a long line of heroes before him to have a whack at killing the phone company. The phone company is like the fabulous Hydra of Lerna. For each of its head heads that is decapitated, another one or even two more spring forth. In addition, like the Hydra beast which is half snake, the phone company has a very long tail…

Besides the underlying saga, this post also join in the growing chorus advocating what Ken Camp summarize as

… presence and availability, or context, or whatever they become as facets of our digital identity and persona will be a huge piece of the evolution of unified communications.

Martin speaks of context as a driver for communication. I would say that context is the only driver of communication. We never communicate outside of a context, and whatever media we use must be able to take the context into account. But this has nothing to do with the technical context Martin describes. His context is just the mere legacy of the antiquated operating systems and user interface in use today. The context driving the communication is a temporal cross reference intersecting several social groups and encompassing one or several spatial environments. The post is interesting as it goes on trying to develop on concepts tightly related to presence technologies.

I like the way he describes how Outlook may look like if it were "socially" enabled, but I don't think he has grasped the full spread of presence technologies in upcoming communication systems. Describing an "address book" the way he does shows he simply did not take into account that the actual communication context is in effect part of one's own presence. So tomorrow's "address book" should only show what is relevant in this context.
There is another point where the post slightly misses the target. Or maybe this is a matter of wording. When talking of "collaborative" I am more inclined to use it in regards to inter-individuals collaboration, whereas Martin seems to emphasize the inter-applications collaboration. Beyond this semantic digression, I have previously described my frustration in front of current user interfaces, and this has since been further developed by Giacomo Vacca when he also deplores the crude state of these interfaces and says

It's not about how presence technologies provide information on users' availability, but rather how much presence information can be truly dynamic and reflect users' habits and personalities.

To illustrate my point, let's go back to the phone communication. The success of the phone lies in its ability to mediate the most important mean of communication common to any human being: voice. And voice has the intrinsic capability to convey intonations as well as articulated semantic meaning. As such, a voice communication system providing a decent sound quality will compete on fair ground with face-to-face communications where only sound is available. This quality makes the phone system unique, as it introduce almost no perturbation in the medium. And this quality also makes the phone system’s success. Every other means of communication introduce much higher perturbations in the medium.

I believe the phone is inexorably moving toward a wireless mobile device. This is a no return journey, and in a few years we won't see any fixed phone left. Hopefully, at the same time, the phone device interface would have evolved well beyond using

• a touch tone keypad that was the ultimate invention in the early sixties
  
• a display trying to simulate a miniature windowing system that became common in the early eighties.

Just look at all these poor mobile phone victims running in every airports' corridors, bent forward, pulling their roller bags with one hand while furiously thumb hammering their mobile phone with the other. Don't you feel they look strangely like the common representation of our Neanderthal cousins on the human evolution charts?

To conclude, I agree with Martin that we need to have a more integrated experience when we communicate, for the simple reason that technology should get out of the way. But, unfortunately, every example he gives still bears a strong influence from today's (or rather yesterday's) devices limitations. The most important of it being the use of phone numbers. The current phone devices are so closely associated with numbers that they are de-facto unfriendly to any other means of communication found on the Internet. A keyboard is already unfriendly, but a keyboard where you have to press three times the same key to obtain a single character is hundred times more unfriendly. We are so used to this approach for voice calls that we seem unable to think outside this limitation. See how Martin only describes "address books" as repertories for phone numbers…

Until the two words "phone" and "number" have been taken far apart, I believe we will unfortunately still see a lot of the phone company, both inside peoples’ minds and outside.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Conversation space, Phone number, Antecipate

Presence is irrational by nature

Technologies are rational by design, and they tend to rationalize human activity when used. I came across an interesting reading (Luhmann, 1993, 1995) which emphasized the over simplification often introduced by technology. I think this is particularly true in complex human related applications, such as those found in mediated communications.

The flipside of technological simplification is loss of flexibility and contingent response that have to be re-instituted through artificial mechanisms. Technological sequences cannot handle (i.e. absorb, ignore, forget or dissimulate) unforeseen incidents at the level on which they operate, even though technologists currently attempt to construct systems that respond to emergent events on the basis of learning from experience (i.e. neural networks). Such simple behavioral characteristics as forgetfulness, dissimulation and indifference, that we often assume to be part and parcel of the limitations of humans, play an extremely important and adaptive role under conditions of emergence, complexity and unpredictability.

Human communications and interactions are neither rational nor designed. Furthermore, temporal regularity is important in human experience. Communication technologies create perturbations in the regularity of time that characterizes a life made of personal habits and social routines. Habits and routines are more than repetition. They are often unique and spontaneous human experiences, where each repetition is different from the last.
By comparison, immediacy and access, as well as the constant flow of information, command that we attend to whatever is nearest and most urgent. Doing so, we lose a line of continuity to a dashed line of distraction.  In the end, we pay attention, but in spurts of sameness that contribute little to a healthy experience.

The adaptation between the technical and the human takes place at what is called the "interface." In the case of communication, this not just a user interface, but also a social interface. It is social because it mediates communication while facilitating the exchange of interpersonal cues and acknowledgments.

Because communication and presence technologies can stretch our relationships across time and space, they produce proximities involving rhythms of interaction, coordination of activity, ways of communicating, and ways of offering and protecting our availability. They do it creating kind of virtual proximities in which we become "equidistant" to one another. Unlike physical proximity, temporal proximity can be described as having qualities of speed, duration, acceleration, rhythm, and synchronization. Amongst the major challenges for communication and presence technologies we will find

• respect for habits and social routines without reducing them to simple functional repetitions,
• seemless flexibility and adaptability of user interaction,
• mediation of rythms and time, in complement of space, to induce a more human impression of proximity.

Today's communication and presence technologies’ interfaces often create a recurring sameness. The functions codified in the technologies reproduce the same abstracted operation and the same simplified representation with each repetition. This functional repetition displaces the spontaneity of social tradition. And we begin to think that repetition itself is dull, when it is the technical procedure implementation that is dull. Just look at a mobile phone to get a sense of what I am driving at…

Technorati Tags: Presence, Social network, Antecipate

Presence calls out attention

Every new piece of information put on the web becomes available to millions, almost instantaneously. Drawing a parallel with material goods, information production can be virtually infinite, and consequently, be in oversupply. Around ten years ago several definitions started appearing for what is now known as the "attention economy". The main concept was that over abundant information could only get value from the attention anyone of us was willing to devote to specific pieces of information.

To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention. Therefore an information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.

In economy, property is the ownership of wealth. If attention has become a new kind of wealth, then one gain property whenever one attracts and holds it. One attracts attention by making oneself, and whatever one wants attention for, as visible as possible. Thus one holds best onto this form of property by being most open. In fact, this property is in the minds of one's beholders, and there needs to be as many minds as possible.
If one is good enough at attracting attention, it may create a temporary "enslavement", where those giving attention turn over control of a large part of their mind and even body. Attracting attention also means acquiring recognition, identity, and meaning in the eyes of those around. One's store of attention can sustain spirit, mind and body, in just about any form.
At the same time, those paying attention will also want to get attention for themselves by quoting, citing, criticizing, parodying, gossiping about, or referring to an attention grabber as if a star. In the extreme case which govern fans relationships to their stars, giving attention will take multiple forms such as listening to them, heeding what they say, doing what they ask, waiting on them, waiting for them, serving them, loving them, in short doing anything and everything for them.
In an "attention economy" it becomes possible to benefit from revealing as much as possible about oneself, including weaknesses, and just about anything else. That way, humanizing oneself not only stir up interest, but makes it easier for others to imagine themselves in one's shoes, which means turning their minds to see from one's eyes, a key part of any "paying of attention". Conversely, hiding away will likely turn attention elsewhere and create a risk of losing at least some of one's attention capital.

When they are not in the same place, peoples maintain presence and proximity through communication. Not through images, or appearance, but by maintaining communication. Beyond this, I think that presence technologies influence and enhance our proximity to one another.

Presence occurs when part or all of an individual's experience is mediated not only by the human senses and perceptual processes but also by human-made technology (i.e., "second order" mediated experience) while the person perceives the experience as if it is only mediated by human senses and perceptual processes (i.e., "first order mediated experience).

Early conceptions limited presence to its spatial and physical context, partly because of the technical nature of the mediation. But timing, rhythm, speed, and continuity, despite having a temporal quality that is easily disrupted by technical mediation, are critical to human communication and social interaction. They are more difficult for us to model and render, but nonetheless, I believe that temporal distortions participate fundamentally in one's sense of being on the same page, being in synch, having or sharing time together.
As a consequence, proximity should not only be based on spatial co-presence anymore, but instead tuned to the frequencies of virtual presence. Proximity in the age of its technical production becomes temporal. Proximity mediated through presence technologies produces continuity in spite of physical separation from one another.
In the "social" web, one trades physical presence for virtual presence negotiation in order to get access to people, obtaining their attention, knowing whether a person is there, and there for oneself. Presence technologies provide a temporal continuity through discontinuous participation, creating a sense of being with others who aren't there by projections of oneself in the virtual world. By doing so, presence technologies have the capacity to bring connectedness to people. They help spanning time and weaving a social fabric whose consistency simulate a "being there" for one another in time, but not space.

The real promise of the "social" web is to help satisfy the ever more pressing desire for attention. It's not the associated communication technologies which are important, but rather the individual and social practices into which the technology becomes embedded: messaging, talking, trading, dating, buying, selling, etc… They all participate into how one is perceived as present in the "virtual world". And when everything else has become boring, only "social" presence remains. In this world, I see presence as a social involvement, one that calls out attention, or to put it another way, in the "social" web it is presence that drives the way people trade attention.

In spite of this simple economical equation, none of the so called "social" networks have yet embarked on a re-architecture based on real-time presence technologies; instead they keep using overhauled legacy web techniques.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Social network, Antecipate

Of compartments and silos...

Brad Casemore presented earlier the upcoming integration of Yahoo! messenger into their mail service interface as

In another example of how online applications are becoming richer and more useful, Yahoo announced today that it will embed instant messaging into its web-based email program within the next few months, allowing  users to partake in live chats from Yahoo Mail and to obviate the need for installation of a desktop IM application.

I generally appreciate Brad's comments in the way they keep a positive tone. In this particular case, I am less incline than he is to only find positive aspects in this upcoming integration.  First of all, there is this persistence by one of the remaining consumer instant messaging incumbents to stick to proprietary protocols, rather than embracing open and documented standards. But more generally, as I pointed out earlier, I don't think Yahoo's current "me too" attitude is in any way giving a sign of "online application becoming richer and useful". If industry trend there is, it exemplify this industry inability in general, and of Yahoo! in this particular case, to properly grasp the current usage trends, and to provide relevant solutions to problems at hand.

Mike Gotta has perfectly analyzed the growing disaffection for email observed in "the current set of digital natives (those that have grown up using computers)". With the commoditization of tightly interwoven communication tools, the challenge of technology is not to offer a single command point trying to aggregate a "pot-pourri" of legacy and current communication channels, but rather to enable the proper use of the most appropriate channel and to move seamlessly between channels/devices at any time, while keeping the conversation active and rich.

I believe this is the kind of evolution we notice when we observe how teenagers prefer their IM client to an email client. But I would not qualify this of "generational". In my opinion, it results simply from a different "learning" context and different "social" priorities. The important point is that IM is nothing but another channel for communication, although more in line with the natural real-time nature of face-to-face communication than email in the current impersonation of online "social" spaces.
Looking at the upcoming UI mock-up, which does not provide the slightest hint of presence enabled contact list, makes me wonder if anyone at Yahoo! has even noticed that this evolution has already started. From the look of it and the justifications provided in the original announcement , email and IM are still living in far away silos at Yahoo! But can we really expect a walled garden proponent not to keep the few neurons at its disposal in separate cubicles?

As I hinted before, a true improvement would be to provide a generalized messaging interface, and leave the final routing decision to a combination of presence and user action. On the surface, one could argue that the proposed possibility of copying an email under redaction into an IM provides the same functionality. But this would be missing the true nature of asynchronous communication: it is a special case of synchronous communication, not the other way round. And to notice this subtle difference requires thinking out of the silos.

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Usability, Antecipate

Non verbal presence

I have reported earlier how different media type can affect the nature of peoples' interaction and by consequence influence the medium chosen by an individual who wishes to communicate. Many factors are affecting the level to which a medium is perceived as sociable, warm, sensitive, personal or intimate when it is used to interact with other people. Peoples in distributed environments are adjusting to perceived physical contact and closeness, even if it is not possible, just as people strive for intimacy equilibrium in the real world. They are also eager to retain the possibility of doing interactive acts in this environment, even if they would not do them due to social rules in the real world or the mediated context.
They will thus look for technical mediations involving impressions as much as they involve expression. For technologies that mediate presence, this mean:

• Assisting the medium in its production of perception.
• Minimizing the distortion or amplification of affective movements.
• Allowing the user's action structuring.

I have previously presented views on how some form of feedback, when added to presence technologies, was desirable to minimize the intrusive nature of notifications and, by consequence, to limit some of the medium induced distortion. But I believe presence systems have a natural bias towards machine to machine communication, and most UI (user interface) still fall short at conveying non-verbal contextual cues. Although we find a host of presence attributes that can be aggregated and used to infer "enhanced" availability states, the available rendering techniques to assist the medium and enrich the user's perception of its environment still fall short of providing an adequate answer.

For example, in text based communication systems, commonly used UI substitutes for non-linguistic cues, such as gestures and facial expressions, are avatars, smileys and other fixed design elements. Clearly these "signs" have at best a reduced correlation to the user's intended meanings. And where a user's facial expressions are directly expressive, these are indirectly expressive. In particular, their appearance doesn't vary from user to user. Further more, they have to be interpreted in context. When a smiley used in an UI, the user has to resort not only to its knowledge of the author, but also to the context of email, IM, chat, or whatever communication tool is in use. In that respect, I don't agree with the argument that these design features enhance presence. They just slightly increase the palette of expressions, and minimally assist the medium in producing an impression.

I believe current human facing presence systems, although they like to qualify themselves of "enhanced" presence providers, still exhibits a very primitive capacity to render information about posture and non-verbal cues as they are perceived by the individual to be present in the medium. Maybe this is further amplified by the strong application (vs activity) oriented nature of today’s windowing UIs, and the difficulty many designers have to free themselves from "best practices" when these are nothing but entrenched habits. I think our UIs are showing their age and definitively lack the dynamic and ingredients necessary to the required production of perception.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Conversation space, Antecipate

Morphing conversation UI

I am not a typical "example" when it comes to user interface, and I have my own idiosyncratic preferences, especially for communication applications. In particular, I despise the way we have been forced by the incumbent desktop software players to use mail clients to manage information. Their influence is so insidious, that even their strongest open-source contenders stick to the same screen real estate concept.

I came across this short post by Mike Gotta elaborating on the ineluctable death of the email client as we know it.

Concerning enterprise environments, at some point a few years down the road, shifting demographics as Danah Boyd points out in this post, will have an interesting impact on the future of e-mail clients. Once "digital natives" become a large part of the workforce, it's likely that we'll see a tipping point where users will prefer real-time communication front-ends to async front-ends. Yes, e-mail clients will support unified messaging and will morph to provide a real-time communication (RTC) user experience but younger workers may prefer to live in more natively-designed RTC clients (such as Microsoft Office Communicator and IBM Sametime), especially as those clients support both social and work-related capabilities.

I am a bit disappointed because my relief is not readily in sight, but this analysis is pre-announcing what I believe to be the irreversible evolution of our way to interact with desktop communicating applications. There was a not so distant time where the latest hipe was about getting IP to every workstation. The natural evolution would be to get conversations to the workstations, any type of conversation, and have all the associated communication stacks available as local servers to any application whishing to use them. At that point, it will become obvious that email is just an asynchronous channel for real time text exchange in a wide presence enabled communication system, instead of instant messaging being a real time version of email, as the current generation of "office" software would like us to believe. And I hope this difference will bring UIs more to my taste.

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Usability, Antecipate

At your presence's convenience

Several researches agree that people are very ineffective at working on too many things at the same time, because of the limited human multitasking capabilities. They conclude that switching from one task to another is particularly costly, especially if the current task has an important cognitive load, as opposed to repetitive tasks based on pattern recognition. When taken in the context of the ever increasing reliance on information, nowadays human attention has become a scarce resource whereas information abounds.

I particularly appreciate the "savor" Alec Saunder's brings to the reflection on interruptions when he writes:

One of the casualties of the last 25 years has been the social compact governing when it is acceptable to interrupt, and when not 125 years ago, before the telephone, if a gentleman wanted to meet another gentleman, he'd send his man around with a calling card to invite the other to meet. It was the presence of its day. It's a metaphor that we really need to examine carefully, because there's much to be learned that is applicable now First, it's completely individual. Whether I choose to meet with Mike, but not Ted, is completely dependent on the circumstances and context the requestor and requested parties find themselves in. Second, the decision making process is completely private. Unlike presence today ("Hey, I can see he's online, but he's not answering my ping! Ignorant b*stard!"), the decision making process was completely opaque to the caller.

He goes on saying that “presence does not model the social contract between individuals”, but rather the cold behavior of communication device. I would furthermore add that "immediacy" has taken down all the polite approach that was allowing the choice of the "time and place" by the parties. By denying this choice, presence notifications in their current forms take a growing part at lowering people's already diminished attention support.

Whilst at the level of the perception (see, hear, feel) people's attention is influenced by external stimuli, goals, motivations, and intentions impact how they focus their attention. Furthermore, these two processes constantly interact to determine one's attention state. In a group, for example, an external stimulus may attract a member's attention, but the lack of motivation for the proposed focus will quickly divert its attention to another item. Alternatively, one may have a strong motivation to focus on a certain item, but an inappropriate presentation of the item content may hinder the desired focus to be established. Perturbations of the delicate balance between perception and motivation often results in an attention deficit, and in turn in lower productivity.

In situations of frequent interruptions or tasks alternance, researchers have noted a significant increase in cognitive load following the actions necessary to restore the context of an interrupted task. Resuming a task is already difficult in the context of current workstation interfaces, as these interfaces use an "application oriented" rather than "task oriented" approach to computer activities. In order to complete a task a user is obliged to fragment the task in subtasks, such as collecting data from a spreadsheet and pasting it in a word processor document. This artificial fragmentation of the original task increases the cognitive load on the user, and interruptions further erode its attention support.
As multi-tasking and interruptions become the norm in working environments, it is important for awareness systems to support the user's attention by supplying personalized and adaptable notification, thus reducing the resulting disruption. Interruption and notification must take into account many factors spanning across the various aspects of attention and contribute to making an interruption more or less appropriate or disruptive. In my opinion, the most important aspects to consider must include:

• The context of interruption,
• The timing of the interruption,
• The content of the interruption.

As I stated earlier, in face to face situations, human beings are able, in a very short time, and with a limited knowledge of other people's activity, of deciding whether an interruption would be acceptable or not. In particular, I believe the exact point in time when the notification is delivered makes a significant difference on whether and how the interruption is perceived and on how much disruption it will bring to the current task.
Recent studies on notification timing have highlighted four types of solutions to manage user interruptions: "immediate, negotiated, mediated, and scheduled". Interruptions can be delivered at the soonest (immediate), or the person has explicit control over when they will handle the interruption (negotiation). A third party system may also dynamically decide when best to interrupt the user (mediated), or always hold all interruptions and deliver them at a predefined time (scheduled). In most situations negotiation is said to be the best choice. But I believe adding feedback to presence will require exploring dynamic combinations of negotiation and mediation.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Antecipate

Seeing is not believing...

Announcements in the video-conference space have been flourishing lately. I find them interesting as they attempt to provide answers to the crude rendering of virtual conversation spaces when compared to the rich person-to-person interactions of real life.  A large telecom vendor has dubbed its system "Telepresence" and is pretending that

You can think of those technologies as precursors to true telepresence that replicates the experience of "being there".

Well, the advent of large flat screens technologies have certainly made it easier to cover an entire wall with screen panels, but the result remains far from the participants individual holographic representations in the Jedis meetings of "Star Wars"… In my opinion, these video-conference systems fall short in the way they provide view points, usually through a limited number of video cameras. And this latest offering of a well known software vendor claiming to provide

a 360-degree, panoramic video of side-by-side images of everyone who taking part in the conference.

will not make me change my opinion...

Real life shared conversation spaces allow people to maintain instant knowledge about others' interaction with the space. In a virtual world, the concept of conversation space awareness is key for systems wanting to approach the fluid interaction of face-to-face communication.
In physical conversation spaces, participants often shift their attention back and forth between individual and shared activity. In these moments, the space gathers lightweight information such as quick glances at another participant's or its personal area. This information participates in maintaining a sense of awareness of where other persons are and what they are doing. For example, in a work environment, this space awareness would help coordinate tasks and resources. People can use the space awareness to anticipate others' actions, help them with their tasks, and interpret references to objects in context.

Conversation space awareness comes naturally in a face-to-face communication, but it is far more difficult to render in real-time communication systems. In video-conference, only a fraction of the space may be seen, and each participant often does not see the same part as others. More generally, real-time communication systems reduce the richness of communication, and their user interface hides many actions that are visible in a real-life space. Moreover, the perceptual and physical abilities we use to maintain this awareness, such as glances, are replaced with mechanisms that are both slow and clumsy.

As I explained in a previous post, awareness is an essential component of presence. Designers of presence based systems will face two problems to integrate conversation space awareness. First, they will need to know what information should be captured about a person's interaction with the conversation space. Second, they will have to decide how this information should be presented to other participants.

The constituents of conversation space awareness fall into two groups. The first group concerns what is happening to participants:

• Amount of activity (How active are the participants?)
• Changes in progress (What changes are participants making?)
• Expectations (What do participants need me to do next?)
• Nature of actions (What are the participants doing?)

The second group deals with where it is happening in the space:

• Focus (Where are the participants?)
• Influence (Where can participants make changes?)
• Objects in use (What objects are participants using?)
• View extents (What can participants see?)

Setting explicit status in a presence system provides a first level of awareness. A second level of awareness can be inferred from events observed inside the conversation space, such as the visible or audible signs of interaction with the space or its artifacts, or the participants' activity behavior. But capturing intentionally public utterances, expressions, or gestures that are not explicitly directed at other participants may prove difficult.

In the end, even if a system integrates information from a variety of sensors and other sources, presence indicators still have a long way to go before they reflect true human nature. The “flat” implementations of today's user interfaces plays certainly in disfavor of a realistic rendering. And then there is the user behavior itself that comes into play. Just because my office's door is open and I happen to be looking outside, don't take it for granted you can come in and interrupt me.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Conversation space, Antecipate

The three legs of presence

Several researches have largely explored the fields of "social presence" and "awareness". However, in my opinion, the emergence of "social networking" and "virtual community" requires adding the concept of “connectedness” to the features mix of any effective real-time communication system. I believe important to review these concepts and see how they inter-relate. These relations will have to be considered carefully when building what is commonly called "presence" into these communication systems.

The concept of "awareness" has been used in many ways. Fifteen yeas ago, academics defined it as

an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity.

Awareness is usually classified into four types:

• availability awareness, which relates to the availability of people and objects.
• contextual awareness, which includes physical, social and mental context.
• group awareness, which promotes the feeling of belonging to a group.
• workplace awareness, which is knowledge of tasks within the virtual environment.

In these definitions, awareness is used in the sense of feeling what is believed to be an external perception, whether synchronous or near-asynchronous. It encompasses both a perception of the users of a system, and a feature of a system that facilitates that perception.

The concept of “social presence” is more ancient. Thirty years ago Short et al. in “The Social Psychology of Telecommunications” defined it as:

the degree of perception of the other person in a mediated communication and the consequent perception of their interpersonal interaction.

More recently, in “Criteria and Scope conditions for a Theory and Measure of Social Presence”, Biocca et al. depicted social presence as pertaining to the user, but closely related to the interaction and the medium:

it is a temporary judgment of the nature of interaction with the other, as limited or augmented by the medium.

Social presence theory studies efficiency and satisfaction in the use of different communication media. Short et al consider social presence a subjective dimension of a medium in its capacity to transmit information about facial expression, direction of looking, posture and non-verbal cues as they are perceived to be present in the medium. This dimension affect the level to which a medium is perceived as sociable, warm, sensitive, personal or intimate when it is used to interact with other people. Social presence varies between different media, it affects the nature of the interaction and influence the choice of a medium by an individual wishing to communicate.

The concept of “connectedness” is one of the basic principles which underlie social behavior. In psychology, the fundamental needs for belonging and connectedness are described as powerful drivers to promote social relationships.

Virtual multi-media communication can create a sense of connectedness or “feeling of being in touch”. In awareness systems this may be more important than the content of the communication. Even without direct information exchange, people want to maintain connection with others. Look how instant messaging users monitor the availability of their buddies, and exchange greetings without any need for a real information exchange. Similarly, witness how mobile phone users exchange SMS and share a common, although asynchronous, experience.
There are also situations where connectedness does not imply direct awareness of another person, but rather of an object. Receiving a post card may create a feeling of connectedness although there is no direct awareness of the other person.

Real-time communication systems aim at reducing the spatial constraint in peoples' conversations. Presence has the capacity to convey additional context attributes pertaining to a conversation. If the experience of connectedness is a basic human need, it may help design communication systems enabling connectedness without imitating face-to-face communication, and facilitate "immediacy" and "intimacy" while minimizing intrusiveness.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Antecipate

Presence enabled identity

Giving back digital identity ownership to end users has been one of the most in-vogue identity meme of the year. But why is digital identity not any more in its owner possession in the first place? Mostly because there is no way for an application to trace the real you back and check your privileges when needed. The result is the high number of digital identity fragments disseminated all over the internet that every power user has left behind in its wandering.

An obvious first answer to this fragmentation is the re-concentration of digital identity fragments in a limited number of places. The usual advantages are put forward, mainly the convenience of near single-sign-on. On the web, several alternatives have been implemented by various types of identity brokers, which are able to provide relevant assertion about a party identity and/or privileges. But most proposed assertion systems require the end-user to trust the identity broker. And frankly speaking, I am not convinced many end users go to the length of making sure when choosing an identity broker that:

• Strong credentials are enforced and required by the broker,
• Credentials are securely stored in the identity broker's database.
• Physical and perimeter security at the broker's point of presence is enforced.

The next obvious answer would be to re-concentrate the complete digital identity in the immediate vicinity of the end-user. After all, many tend to agree that physical ownership gives a better feeling of security…

An interesting proposal has been made in a recent series of posts, where are described the components of a reinvented internet. I have several concerns about the entire internet re-invention, but Jason is also bringing up some clever and simple ideas. In his approach, each and every user will own a domain name on which a private identity broker will be located. The proposal is interesting because an application can use the private identity broker directly as it would a web identity broker. Today's applications will also be able to resolve that private broker address just using DNS.

Although it gives a better sense of ownership to the end-user, this approach does not entirely provide a solution to the original question when the user is going mobile or when an external application requests a dynamic authorization. These use cases are no edge cases in my opinion.

Carrying a laptop everywhere may not provide the ultimate freedom. A PDA might give a better feeling, but still. Using a password from a distant terminal will work, but is not better that today's solutions. And being remote definitively decreases the ability to provide interactive authorizations. I believe real identity ownership would ultimately involve some kind of portable device, using biometrics to assess one's identity when in use. This device would in turn advertise its presence on the network. It would then be "seen" by the private server. In turn, the server would be able to interact securely with the device and retrieve whatever privileges required by calling applications.

This is the nearest I would go toward bringing together identity and presence. And why not just call it "presence enabled identity".

Technorati Tags: Identity, Presence, Trust, Digital identity, Antecipate

Mobile presence dial-tone

The word is out about Jaiku. Some speak of “mobile social networking”, other mention “rich presence”. I would simply call it another perfect example of XMPP’s extreme flexibility and adaptability.

Jaiku combines a well conceived Symbian client with an XMPP back-end, and a web based front end service. The service is sleek and easy to register with, offer a simple and uncluttered interface, and all the necessary scripts to include your mobile presence in any web page. The client, for the time being limited to Nokia Series 60 Second Edition phones, integrates cleverly with the phone directory, converting it into a “presence enabled” directory. The client is also aware of many phone events and functions, such as the calendar. It appears the Jaiku’s team has slightly extended the XMPP presence stanzas in order to accommodate a richer set of information to includes

… an IM-style away line, your phone profile (ring volume, vibrate), location (country, city/region, neighborhood), Bluetooth devices around, upcoming calendar events, and the duration how long your phone has been idle.

Although the information released in the enhanced presence states may be perceived as disclosing a potentially large amount of your privacy, the service gives a perfect example of presence as the new dial tone. Presence being embedded in the phone directory, it is displayed whenever you want to place a call to one of your contacts.

This further reinforce, in my opinion, the advantages of XMPP. XMPP is a presence based protocol. And Jaiku is a perfect example of a non IM XMPP application natively presence enabled.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Presence, Antecipate