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Nokia Chat becomes Contacts on Ovi

Nokia Beta Labs has updated / rebranded the Nokia Chat client into Contacts on Ovi and released versions for all devices except the S60 5th Edition platform which is really only the 5800 for today.  Nokia Chat and now Contacts on Ovi really is a great way to do IM on the go.  Aside from the simple IM handling you can also broadcast your location, send locations to friends and even send a voice message (gone in Contacts on Ovi).  In the latest version, you can also share your current music track much like on a desktop IM client.

What’s new, apart from the brand? I’ll have to first say that the
clients are in a better shape, we’ve resolved lots of bugs that have
been bothering you and us too. Secondly, we’re supporting lots of more
devices now. The new platform we have a client for is S60 3rd Edition
Feature Pack 2. It’s about time, right? We wanted it to look better,
and have more features in it. With the new client available for the
latest models you’ll be able to broadcast the music you listen as a
part of your personal message (for those of you that are in to XMPP,
I’ll just give out that it’s using the PEP extension, which you’ll find
supported in some PC clients too).  [Nokia Beta Labs]

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Where’s my Federated Presence?

It’s easy to maintain a single status line across services which lets you report the same update across your social services.  I tend to use Ping.Fm mainly which lets me deliver cross-service updates via email, IM and web including mobile.  What’s missing in this age of unified communications though is the ability to share a richer level of presence.  

By presence of course I mean my actual presence – am I in a meeting, on the phone, on the go or even in a different timezone from you.  All of this information can be relative input for deciding how to best get in touch with someone and there is still no way to do this effectively outside of the expensive enterprise route from companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft which also require that you use their solution exclusively without taking inputs from other sources.  Of course these inputs should be definable so I don’t share random personal bits with business contacts or important business information across to my Facebookfriends but I realize that’s a degree of complexity that might be more challenging.  Still even the “basic” federation for presence seems to be missing …  

The key thing here is that I don’t want anyone else to have to install or use a particular service for this to work.  I just want this solution to deliver the right level of detail to the right service so my various contacts are informed appropriately.  Not too hard right?