Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Jean-Louis Seguineau has written a useful taxonomy of presence and awareness this morning.  He breaks awareness up into four categories:

• 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.

And then provides two definitions of presence:

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

and

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

Today’s presence systems are about little more than availability awareness, and perhaps that’s the biggest problem with them. Far from being useful mediators in communications, they are in fact more intrusive than valuable. 

That is, in fact, the problem we set out to solve with iotum. 

Astricon Dallas has started.  I’m skipping the tutorials today, and heading to Dallas tomorrow.  A 6AM flight.  Ugh!  Still, Astricon promises to be a great event.  500+ attendees, and 35 exhibiting companies all focused on, what else?  Asterisk. 

I’ll be there as CEO of iotum, naturally.  We’ll be making an announcement on Thursday at the show.  I’ll also be giving a talk Thursday titled “Being Relevant”.

In addition I’ll be there wearing my blogger hat and looking for the cool new Asterisk stuff at the show to share with you all.

Drop me a line or find me at the show if you’d like together.  You can reach me via my iotum number at 613-482-9088. 

I’ve been part of a community of folks using The Good Blogs for the last couple of months.  It’s a blog discovery widget that shows you the latest posts from a community of users.  The concept is pretty simple: join The Good Blogs, and cross promote your blog and other people’s blogs in your community.  Not quite the same as a blogroll, but perhaps more useful since it enables discovery of relevant new feeds that you might not have known about before.

Today The Good Blogs is out of private beta. You can see it in action over on the right hand side of my blog.  If it thrills you, you can head over to The Good Blogs and join the public beta. 

Congrats to Vernon and Tony and the rest of the Good Blogs team.  The Good Blogs is a slick and useful widget.  

At a recent Gartner symposium, analyst Bob Hafner advised customers not to invest in expensive desk phones with large displays.  Deploy a softphone instead, because deskphones will be gone in five to ten years.  Andy Abramson teases that theme out a little further, noting that many Voice 2.0 capabilities can be had without replacing existing networks.   Russell Shaw chimes in with the observation that there’s great value in information derived from calling patterns.  Indeed!

 

This is a picture of the iotum Relevance Engine.  Notice the dashed line on the left side connecting into a blob labelled “softswitch, IP-PBX, or Media Gateway”.  It’s an XML-RPC interface between the network element and iotum, which means that it can be used by just about anything, and not just the three network elements I’ve identified.  It could also have the word Service Control Point in there if you wanted to deploy it in the existing telephone network.  Or, for that matter, you could add “Mobile” to that mix.  We’ve done experimental work with deploying interfaces to the Relevance Engine on mobile handsets as well.  Or, “Application”… if you wanted to add our capabilities to another application — say a specialized terminal or a conference calling system. Or “Website”…  In other words, we’re network, terminal, and server agnostic.  As I said last week at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa, iotum is built for mash-ups. 

Today, distribution of applications to telephony users is largely controlled by the incumbents, because they control the network.  However, (a) some people will put call control applications on handsets and (b) regulations require incumbents to give network access to third parties at reasonable prices. 

There is no reason Voice 2.0 applications have to wait for the incumbents.  We can all get started today.

I used to have a zippy little tablet PC from HP as my main machine.  Not a Ferrari, more like a Miata.  With a little TLC, it was fun to use, and gave me a great deal of pleasure as I went about my daily work. But you know, it has become more like Grandma’s Valiant than the PC I used to know and love. On Thursday I ran through a 15 minute boot cycle on my little tablet!  Between the networking applications, the update applications, the various PC utilities I use to “simplify” my life, and a variety of other software, all competing for the CPU and the network during the boot cycle, my once speedy PC had been reduced to the performance equivalent of a 1987 386 running Windows 1.03… a slug!  And you know what?  I had the same problem on the 3Ghz desktop I use in my home office.

Time for some strong medicine.  

I scrubbed both PCs — backed up the data, formatted the hard drives, and installed fresh.  On the home office PC I’m running Windows Vista RC2, Office 2007 Beta 2TR, and TrendMicro PC-Cillin for Windows Vista.  On the tablet, Windows XP, Office 2003, Microsoft OneCare Live and IE7.  On both, I run MSN Messenger, Skype, and Foldershare as well. 

ASIDE: You can really tell that Windows XP is getting long in the tooth.  Immediately after installed, I ran Microsoft Update for 90 minutes, downloading and installing 76 fixes, patches, and other assorted goo for Windows XP and Office 2003. 

I made some hard choices on quite a few applications.  I won’t be installing some old favorites like Gizmo Project, Google Talk, SightSpeed, Hullo, and Vox. Every one of these programs have great features that I love, but not enough people I know use them and all of them are trying to uniquely capture me into their network. I will be living without a bunch of my favorite utilities — Anagram, and Skylook for instance. They’re all great technologies, but they all also impact the performance of my PC.

That brings me to the point of this sorry tale.

This past week Preston Gralla asked Why Has Microsoft Abandoned the Power User?  He asserts that Windows Vista and IE 7 are far less customizable than they used to be, and that Microsoft is catering to a more general audience. Tim O’Reilly sees this as a sign of the maturity of the PC, and that innovation has moved elsewhere.  Maybe, or maybe not.

In the VoIP world, a much less mature market than the PC, Martin Geddes hammers on Gizmo Project for usability flaws, while Garrett Smith defends Gizmo as a tool for developers and power users. 

O’Reilly and Geddes are right.  Give me simplicity.  Give me ease of use.  Give me a whole experience.  Don’t make me jump through any more hoops than necessary, and most of all, don’t try to lock me in. 

So, I grudgingly keep MSN and Skype, because most of the people I want to communicate with using these tools — IM and P2P telephony — use products from these vendors.  Trillian, while a great idea, won’t work for me.  The developer licenses from the IM companies (and iotum is an IM developer) prohibit the use of “multi-headed” clients.  I use iotum on my desktop, and today it works with MSN directly, rather than a third party abstraction API like Trillian. 

By holding our identities hostage in their networks, and prohibiting the use of multi-protocol clients, the IM vendors maintain the equivalent of the telecom walled garden, but in cyberspace instead.  In the process, they’ve radically jacked up complexity for ordinary users.

Gizmo, Google, Sightspeed, and Hullo… get together and build an open portable identity scheme with a single sign-on scheme for all your networks. Make those networks interoperate. Let us pass traffic seamlessly back and forth, without having to do brain surgery config files, or learn special peering codes.  When I can use Sightspeed to chat with a GoogleTalk user, or Hullo to call a Gizmo account, then you’ll win me back.  Then it’s my choice as to which client I use — not my choice, and the choice of the person I am trying to reach.

And as for you incumbents… well, consider yourselves served notice.  Even the power users of the world are fed up with complexity.