It’s easy to maintain a single status line across services which lets you report the same update across your social services. Â I tend to use Ping.Fm mainly which lets me deliver cross-service updates via email, IM and web including mobile. Â What’s missing in this age of unified communications though is the ability to share a richer level of presence. Â
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. Â 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. Â 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. Â Still even the “basic” federation for presence seems to be missing … Â
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. Â I just want this solution to deliver the right level of detail to the right service so my various contacts are informed appropriately. Â Not too hard right?
There must presumably be a technology baseline for this? Some kind of Jabber/XMPP type application/service layer which keeps the barrier to entry low and enables the broadest range of devices? Perhaps this is the sort of thing that is a little ahead of the current state of the market but which could become commonplace in the near future as devices develop to a certain common point?
Ready to test it when you are …
I'm game. I don't know how to set this sort of thing up though? Obviously Jaiku and a couple other apps have presence baked in but how would they be linked together? Presumably that is what would be needed?
the trick is that other people don't need to use the app you are using if it's actually federated. Most people I interact with are using all kinds of different services. Jaiku is pretty close on the S60 platform with the integrated contact, presence and chat … was surprised to NOT see that on Android
Tell me about it! I really thought Jaiku would become the Android contact manager (at least the default one). To not have it feature is really a surprise!
maybe they must be