Presence is a really great technology because it keeps people from playing phone tag – among other things. It is an absolute productivity accelerator as it allows people to know what people are up to 24x7. But therein lies the problem. I am not sure I am 100% comfortable with everyone knowing when I am online, on the phone, in a meeting, etc.So the solution to this problem proposed by most people in the industry is to allow different people to know differing amounts of information about us. Relatives, close coworkers, less close coworkers and customers are some of the presence groups I have seen in product demonstrations.
In a perfect world a person would also be able to subscribe to the status changes of others. In addition, people would be notified if someone is “stalking” them meaning watching their every move.
A new product called EnThinnai has been developed with the hopes of delivering presence 2.0 and solving some of the issues I point out in the preceding paragraph. In fact if you read this blog post from Aswath he describes some of what this new service can do. I think there is much room for improvement in presence information dissemination and I hope Aswath is successful with his new venture.
By the way, I don’t like the name EnThinnai but take this with a grain of salt. After all I thought Yahoo!, Amazon and Google were silly company names. Obviously these company names were lot limiting.
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Rich:
Are they trying to build some kind of presence aggregator that can be syndicated to different device or domain? If its a web based client presence (user context), I look at it as very local to the web client and its community. It’s going to be another application with its own version of presence settings. Unless they have some integration plans with other apps. I see a great potential if they can solve the problem of unified presence , where in, any changes in the presence status on one of my app gets synchronized to all my other device’s. This info can be federated to my all friends and community. We could also have some kind of rule based presence for different device. It’s a great start, not sure how they are going to break the walled garden to integrate with different device and domain. We are yet to see a cross IM presence federation. Though technical viable ( SIMPLE or XMPP), need carriers and portal players blessing for any of these to become a reality.
Wish these guys success. BTW, the name SUCKS, what are these guys thinking :-)