“New Presence” and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto
Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. Today, callers have no way of knowing whether the party being called is available, or busy, or would consider the call an intrusion.
The Voice 2.0 Manifesto, October 2005
Today, we live in two extremes. It’s not uncommon for some of us to be talking on the phone, while being pinged on Skype, with multiple IM sessions running. In the middle of it all, the mobile phone will start ringing. Or, the converse is true and we shut down all communications for some peace and quiet.
Life isn’t black and white. It’s shades of grey. We need solutions for managing those shades, rather than the black and white solutions we have in today’s first generation presence systems. The solution is an evolution of today’s crude presence technologies into an architecture which I’ve described as New Presence.
Today’s Presence is an Unfulfilled Promise
The Voice 2.0 Manifesto is “all about me” — my applications, my identity, my availability. Users are in control. Developers bring new value directly to users with innovative applications that exploit the platform assets of identity, presence, and call control. It’s not about the network anymore. It’s about connecting people, and enabling conversations to occur.
Short, Williams and Christie’s 1976 work ”The Social Psychology of Communications” argues that the social impact of a communication medium depends on the social presence it allows communicators to have.
When the Voice 2.0 Manifesto was written, it identified presence as the enabler of conversation, allowing parties to easily determine each others willingness to engage, and by which technology. Presence, today, remains an unfulfilled promise despite the numbers of writers touting it as the future of communications for the better part of three decades now.
Cultural and technical barriers are the root of the problem. Intrusive, inflexible, and widely derided by the very people they’re intended to help, first generation presence systems are frequently turned off by users. Managers view the systems with suspicion, rightly asking whether the intrusion of presence is a productivity drain, rather than a productivity boost. Users react negatively to the idea that their coworkers, partners, suppliers and customers can not only see where they are, but what they’re doing.
The solution is user driven presence — the New Presence model.
Presence geeks will notice the absence of discussion around standards like XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE, and IMS in this piece. My assumption is that we’re going to get to a standard, and rather than debate the niki-norks of a particular protocol, this piece is about a vision for what presence might be when those details are completed.
The New Presence Model
New Presence is a user-centric view of presence. Instead of merely reflecting the crude, device specific “availability awareness” of today, New Presence systems understand our context, relationships, wants and desires. The New Presence model reflects the integrated conversation web we live in today.
The New Presence model has three building blocks: relationships, context, profile. Each of these is a core component in a model which is fundamentally richer, and more user-driven than any presence model previously.
We all have many relationships in our lives. Friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, business partners, affinity groups, political affiliations… these are but a few of the different relationships we have. New Presence spans all of the different relationship repositories we have — personal address books, buddy lists, corporate directories, social networks, CRM and ERP systems, affinity groups, and more — to construct a complete taxonomy of all the relationships we have, not just relationships specific to a particular walled garden. New Presence understands all the roles we play in our lives; worker, friend, parent, sibling, volunteer, and many others.
Most presence systems to-date have focused on a single piece of context information — “availability awareness”, or free/busy on a single device. The context model of New Presence is a vastly richer model, extending today’s free/busy model to include time, time of day, location, social networking information, scheduled events (now and in the future), and many many more sources of contextual information. As we live our lives, we leave electronic trails of information everywhere, all of which can be used to deduce context. At every moment, New Presence knows the fundamentals of what we do, where, with whom, and the relationship we have with those individuals, and how we might want to interact with others.
And lastly a system of profile management is an integral part of the New Presence model. Profiles include identity and role management systems, the ability to specify behavior and rules for different contexts and relationships, and the ability to subscribe to different presence based services and applications which may be offered by various service providers. With these tools, users will selectively reveal their availability to others based on relationship and context, rather than today’s blanket free/busy model. The completeness of the New Presence profile model will naturally lead to it becoming the default way by which we assert identity in the future, and every presentity will have the ability to securely assert the identity of its owner.
It’s Inevitable. The “Walled Garden” Will Crumble
Today’s first generation implementations of presence are crude. Device and domain specific, they are capable of identifying whether a given user is physically present at a particular device, but not much else. Moreover, the current “walled garden” strategy being pursued by carriers and the large Internet portal players makes it exceedingly difficult to share information across multiple presence clouds and ignores the fact that we humans actually live heterogeneous lives. Why can’t AOL users talk to MSN users? Why is that users can access Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Blackberry Messenger on the latest Blackberry devices, but only from three separate applications? Why not run one? Why not have a single identity that can span all networks?
Users live lives outside the artificially constructed walled gardens of the network operators, and so must their presence. Therefore, New Presence assumes a user-centric model of presence rather than a network-centric model. New Presence by its nature must be an off-carrier platform as it is dependent on the ability of users to assert identity, catalog relationships, and gather contextual information across multiple networks.
Whether federated, or centralized, New Presence platforms will span multiple networks and carriers. Because of the inherent value of these systems, users will bring them into the networks on open platforms, rendering the walled gardens porous, and eventually valueless.
Applications: the Value Creators
The Voice 2.0 model is application focused. Applications will be where the value is created. New Presence enables many kinds of applications, such as:
- Call Management Applications. Informed by New Presence, call management systems will be more intelligent and capable than ever before. Whether filtering incoming calls, or brokering future conversations between subscribers, New Presence will add the element of relationship and willingness to all calling scenarios.
- Opt-in Advertising Systems. Google pioneered the use of context-driven advertising on the web. New Presence systems are “communications search engines”. Inherently understanding context, relationship, and profile information, they could be used to drive advertising based revenue models.
- Enterprise Applications. Sales force automation, CRM, accounting, email, payroll, customer service and many other applications will be dramatically enhanced by the deep understanding of relationships and presence offered by New Presence. In the New Presence world,
- Mashup Driven Web Applications. Software vendors have the goal of embedding presence everywhere. Wouldn’t it be nice, they ask, to know who the last five readers of a web site were? Without New Presence, and its consequent policy and privacy guarantees, this vision will never come to pass. New Presence gives users control over how their presence information is consumed, and by whom. Using the XML lingua franca of the web, New Presence systems will supply that information to real estate listing services (so that browsers can find the nearest available agent, for instance), customer service systems, social networking sites, gaming systems, matchmaker services and more. This hybrid model will permit people to freely share as much or as little information about themselves as they wish, secure in the knowledge that it cannot be abused.
Looking Forward
Like Voice 2.0, New Presence presents a user-driven view of the world. In the New Presence world, it’s all about me, my identity, my relationships, and my willingness to engage in conversation.
Perhaps the two biggest barriers to New Presence today are:
- the simple confusion around protocol standards. Ironically, this ought to be the simplest piece to solve. Standards are simply codified ways to describe information. The tussle between SIP / SIMPLE, and XMPP must be resolved before New Presence can effectively move forward. Much of the rest of the technology required already exists.
- the will of the carriers and portal players, who still cling to the wilful delusion that they can capture every aspect of the users communication world. In reality, the vast majority of us lead heterogeneous lives, and no service provider will ever change that.
Once the simple technical barriers are overcome, the intersection of the web and wireless networks will make it possible to bring New Presence capabilities to everyone, and the harried executive with phones and IM applications ringing all around will become a thing of the past.
The future of conversation belongs to open presence systems, and to New Presence systems, specifically.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to
- Martin Geddes, for his spider-web diagrams and work describing the potential value to be created outside of the conversation whgich inspired many of these ideas.
- Jean-Louis Seguineau, for his intellectual and academically stimulating blog about presence on the web today.
- Jeff Pulver, without whom the VoIP revolution would be a lot less interesting and successful than it has been.
- Yossi Vardi, who had the vision to fund ICQ in the 1990’s and in doing so, created today’s world of instant messaging and presence.
- Andy Abramson and Howard Thaw, who encouraged me to put these thoughts down and publish them for the world to see.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:04 am
Alec,
Right On. Agree that Presence today is 2 binary. It HAS 2 incorporate other contexts and filters 2 make it more useful. We’ve xed the 1st hurdle and presence (mainly in the IM world) is now a given and excepted.
There are few appls that are going further with it (iotum starting 2 do a ‘little’); but requires a lot more “daring” startups 2 push the boat out a bit.
There are some technical issues regd stds etc. but agree that these will be overcome and normally some aggregator or intermediatory option that covers most of the systems.
I believe the boundarys will constantly get pushed over the next year or so but until we can interop with the large utilities/telcos we’re just more knocking on the doors (that they continue 2 igonore but 4 how long?)
December 20th, 2006 at 3:35 am
[…] Alec Saunders, who I admire for his vision, wrote (again) a great piece on the future of presence information in telecom industry. He presents a new presence model: […]
December 20th, 2006 at 7:04 am
Agree with you Lal. I think it will take daring startup or two.
December 20th, 2006 at 10:55 am
[…] Alec Saunders has written a very good piece on the new presence. People who arein the VoIP business would know that he is the father of Voice 2.0 and the Voice 2.0 manifesto he proposes is quite interesting to say the least. Enjoy this piece from one of the best current day thought leaders in the industry. […]
December 20th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Why not call “new presence” availability?…
Alec Saunders has just published an excellent article on the future of presence. If you follow VoIP, this is the Saunders who brought us the Voice 2.0 Manifesto (October 2005). I highly recommend Alec’s current essay on the new presence,…
December 20th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
[…] Alec started things with this: “New Presence†and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. Today, callers have no way of knowing whether the party being called is available, or busy, or would consider the call an intrusion. […]
December 21st, 2006 at 2:20 am
[…] When Alec Saunders had started things off by talking about “New Presence” and a few others chimed in, I purposefully didn’t read any of the posts. I did see the resulting email discussion, but that was it. I wanted to really think about the problem for myself before having my thoughts too polluted by reading everyone else’s thoughts. […]
December 21st, 2006 at 9:36 am
Alec did it again.
Nice job on this. Certainly food for thought. Presence as we know it, is largely unfulfilled partly because it’s ubiquity is largely incomplete (my phone is available for ringing, but my AIM id doesn’t know that) as you’ve pointed out. Even more so, I’m not convinced that it will get any more sophisticated than it already is.
That’s because, in over 100 years of operation, the phone still rings when somebody (sometimes a machine) calls me. IM still goes bloop when somebody IM’s me. I get to decide whether to respond or not. If the industry was working on something to help Howard know that I’d welcome a call from Howard in the next hour - that’s useful to me and my business.
IM id’s are largely personal and not often shared on business cards. Even if they are, it still feels uncomfortable IM’ing with somebody that you’ve only just met. This is just like when cellphones first came out and people started putting them on the business cards. It felt uncomfortable to call the person on the mobile because it was so expensive (for them), audio quality was so poor and it wasn’t an emergency.
December 21st, 2006 at 10:19 am
Alec Saunders: “New Presence and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto” - how do we move to the next level of presence awareness?…
Given that I view “presence” as one of the more potentially disruptive elements of IP telephony, I was pleased to see that over on his blog Alec wrote a very lengthy and insightful piece entitled “‘New Presence’ and the Voice…
December 21st, 2006 at 10:55 am
That’s the big challenge Peter — what’s enough? What’s the killer app for presence? Simply watching presence isn’t enough. There’s got to be some new capability that presence enables before it takes off.
December 21st, 2006 at 8:17 pm
[…] The three core elements of New Presence – context, relationship, and profile — are keys to unlocking a powerful presence capability for mobile users. You can think of the New Presence model as analogous to a search engine. In fact, it’s easy to think of it as a search engine for communications. A search engine catalogs the content of the web, and the relationships between different pages (links-in / links-out), and then uses its algorithms to relate keyword search requests to content and relationship. The New Presence model catalogs the users context and relationships, and relates those to profile information and communications behavior. Who do you need to speak with, on what topic, and is that person available to you? Just as Google can find you the right web page, New Presence would be able to find you the right time to talk. […]
December 21st, 2006 at 10:21 pm
[…] Alec Saunders posted an interesting item (manifesto) about Presence as a key enabler of next generation applications – both voice and web. I’d argue that some web applications – especially blogs – have exploded in part due to a simple piece of presence technology – RSS – that made it possible to pay attention to more conversations by alerting you when new posts occurred […]
December 22nd, 2006 at 11:25 am
Thank you for an extremely valuable piece. You’ve put forth a compelling vision statement for moving presence beyond where it is today (available/away) and toward its capability (making our lives more manageable). I have personally used the term “rich presence†instead of “new†since “new†simply implies different (not the old one) whereas “rich†implies more functionality.
Your statement about shades of gray is right on the mark. The industry needs to create something that is technologically feasible in a federated way and palatable to users that don’t want to learn or manage a presence engine.
Presence is not just the enabler of conversation (per your Voice 2.0 manifesto), but the enabler of higher quality conversations that are most relevant and important to me. In essence, presence is one of the key enablers of attention management.
I’m wondering where the brains are in the New Presence model. Where does all the information in your “Integrated conversation web†diagram get crunched for a particular message coming in? In my conceptual model of an attention management system (you can get the slides from my Burton Group teleconference on attention management earlier in December or the model from my blog posting today at knowledgeforward.wordpress.com) I define an “attention response engine†with Rich Presence, Rules & Scoring, and Channel Switching & Routing components. Deciding where presence stops and the decision making kicks in has been a matter of debate between myself and Mike Gotta. From your description, it seems that rules and behavior for contexts is being handled within the presence engine and maybe even the profile management part specifically. I strongly agree with the importance of role in presence as it acts as a shortcut to decision making.
While it’s interesting to think about the kind of applications that New Presence would enable, the focus must be kept on the value to the end users, not the vendors. If the end users don’t get enough out of it, the vendors will be left high and dry. The issue for end users is: does this quiet my life, pushing back noise and pulling the messages most important to me in my current state forward? The manifesto states “it’s all about me†and that’s true. Accordingly, there has to be more said about the value to all the “meâ€s out there and less about the value to vendors (the Applications section).
One last comment – there are a lot more standards needed than simply resolving SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP. Standards on how roles and relationships are defined, interests, rules and scoring, preferences must all be defined. XMPP is extensible, but that doesn’t mean it defines these extensions.
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Although I would thank you for a valuable piece of work, I can’t help but agree with Craig’s comments, in that I can’t imagine this world of new or rich presence being the answer to my information overload.
On many days I am too busy communicating to plan my communications properly, which is what I feel may be the implication when considering relationships, context and profile - all of which change both from moment to moment and certainly over time.
I have many customers, and their ‘relevance to me’ changes according to too many factors to mention.
On whatever level you like, the most important decision making tool will be the user. What us users need is more information about the communication before it occurs, and unfeasible amount of information at our fingertips when it does, and possibly, my wife may be right and I do need to plan more effectively. If I (and my comms tools) was that efficient, perhaps I could speak to everyone that wanted to speak to me - wouldn’t that be good!
December 22nd, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Craig and Matt, I am a strong believer in both of your assertions that value has to be focused on the end user, and not on the vendor. My belief is that these end user focused uses will not be driven by network operators, or equipment vendors, but rather by the users themselves. Moreover, the simplistic presence applications of today will not be enough, as you contend, Matt.
Stay tuned. There’s more yet to come on this topic :)
December 22nd, 2006 at 7:51 pm
This is a great post with insightful comments.
Seems to me that the thing that’s missing from the conversation is the discussion about our wetware limitations. These tools need to be aware of our real world social networks. In this hyper-access world not everyone can be allowed to ping us, and that intelligence needs to be built-in. It’s not enough for us to make these decisions on the fly, because having to make those decision is an interruption in itself. “Who is pinging me, ah, I’m not acknowledging…” They should never be allowed to get that close to force a decision.
High mental bandwidth communications need to be reserved for a select few, and I want my communications systems deciding that for me.
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 pm
[…] “New Presence†and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto — Alec Saunders .LOG (tags: presence identity im) […]
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:33 pm
[…] I was very taken with the post on new presence from Alec Saunders, it does make you think. […]
December 26th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
[…] Phil Windley says that we’re going to need better identity structures before the New Presence can emerge. He asks whether there is a business need which is strong enough to drive presence all by itself. Ken Camp’s lengthy post The Present Known as Presence can be distilled down to the same question: is presence enough?  Paul Jardine also concludes that identity is the issue. […]
December 27th, 2006 at 3:36 am
First, I think your work is stellar - please keep it up!
Second, I wanted to respond to this post of yours to let you know about a certain Lee Dryburgh who runs http://www.connectioncommons.org which deals heavily with digital identity solutions. To quote from Mr. Dryburgh’s site, they are in to…
Emerging digital identity technologies including:
OpenID (which now includes SXIP, LID, and Yadis, plus support for XRI & i-names)
XRI and XDI (includes i-names and i-numbers)
SAML
Liberty Alliance
CardSpace and WS-*
Higgins (it is an API, not a protocol like the other five)
The two of you may have more than a few things to chat about!
Rene Ylanan
December 27th, 2006 at 3:42 am
First, I think your work is outstanding - PLEASE keep it up!
Next, I wanted to respond to this post to let you know about the work of Lee Dryburgh over at http://www.connectioncommons.org, dealing heavily with digital identity solutions. To quote from Mr. Dryburgh’s site, connectioncommons looks into…
Emerging digital identity technologies including:
OpenID (which now includes SXIP, LID, and Yadis, plus support for XRI & i-names)
XRI and XDI (includes i-names and i-numbers)
SAML
Liberty Alliance
CardSpace and WS-*
Higgins (it is an API, not a protocol like the other five)
The two of you may have more than a few things to chat about!
More power!
Rene Ylanan
December 27th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
[…] A few days ago, I wrote a piece that was in response to Alec Saunders post on Presence 2.0. The nucleus for this post came from this passage that a few people have quoted since then: The problem I have isn’t a presence problem, it’s an identity problem. I have too many identities! I know a larger subset of people that have that problem rather than a “presence management” problem. And I think I have a solution: a single identity for all networks. […]
December 28th, 2006 at 7:01 am
[…] Whilst many of us who “work” in telecoms are aware of the cheapest and quickest way to call, 70% of the Planet are still paying astronomical fees for long distance. I really don’t need to improve my presence, if you want to call me my number is over there -> its usually answered 16 hours a day no matter where I am on the planet. We now know how to date anonymously, how to avoiding roaming charges, how to make voip over im calls, how to make pc to pc free calls and how to make long distance calls at incredible rates. How do we pay for these services? By credit card of course What about Marta Potocka’s mother ?, Marta works for me in Cork and is from Poland, her mother hasn’t called her for two years as the cost to call Ireland from Poland is still prohibitive unless you have a credit card and then you can use Rebtel’s fantastic Polish offering. […]
December 28th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
[…] I have been following a number of conversations in the closing days of 2006 on Enterprise 2.0 and the New Presence both of which will have profound impact on our organisations, similar to the social changes that have been taking place in the last couple of years in the consumer space. […]
December 28th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
[…] I’ve had a fascinating backburner conversation concerning the role of calendaring in the New Presence model. Calendars are a marvelously rich source of input to New Presence engines, including: […]
January 21st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
[…] When we built Talk-Now, we simply repurposed the information in the iotum Relevance Engine to reflect availability and willingness to converse, as opposed to using that information to filter calls. Talk-Now is a New Presence application. Bookmarking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:01 pm
[…] Alec started things with this: […]
February 21st, 2007 at 10:52 am
[…] Alec Saunders, CEO di iotum, comunica molto bene la sua visione in merito a queste problematiche e parla di New Presence: New Presence is a user-centric view of presence. Instead of merely reflecting the crude, device specific “availability awareness†of today, New Presence systems understand our context, relationships, wants and desires. The New Presence model reflects the integrated conversation web we live in today. […] […]
February 25th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Alec
Wonderful article. Very thought provoking and well written.
One application area that is missing in this discussion is - outbound notifications
Context information is key to know when a business can send a outbound notification - be it voice, email or SMS. E.g. If i get information on a sale on Sunday night at 6pm - I would not care - since all stores are closed.
However, If i got the SMS or an outbound message on my cell phone at 6:30pm on Wednesday for a 2 hour special - I would be inclined to take an exit to the mall and show up at the sale event on my way home.
There are many more examples.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
[…] http://saunderslog.com/2006/12/19/new-presence-and-the-voice-20-manifesto/ Directories have existed since the advent of voice networks. However, in the Voice 2.0 world, individuals own their own directory listings. What you wish to list in your directory listing, including the fundamentals of name, address, and contact point(s), is your business. It’s your identity, and you get to manage it — not the carrier. Directories can be extended to include the idea of persona’s (work, home, leisure), interests, and a myriad of other kinds of personal information. Directories also become repositories for subscriber preferences, credentials, social networking details and potentially even financial information for voice enabled transactions. In the voice 2.0 world, the directory is an opt-in enabler for applications, commerce, and identity. Unico problema, queste directory dovrebbero essere gestite a livello sovranazionale e libero, non da una multinazionale, altrimenti lanceremmo semplicemente la disputa e la concorrenza a livello più alto. […]
March 26th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
[…] Jared? You need to give iotum Talk-Now a whirl. And welcome to the world of "New Presence". Bookmarking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
April 5th, 2007 at 7:20 am
[…] all point to a future of rich and intelligent presence tools — the "New Presence". They all argue, indirectly, for a common presence cloud as well. Else how could […]
April 5th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
[…] New Presence vision and the iotum Relevance Engine fit very neatly into this space. The evolution of […]
April 24th, 2007 at 8:21 am
[…] Alec Saunders, CEO di Iotum, ha presentato chiaramente quello ritiene sia il futuro dei servizi di telefonia VoIP nel suo Voice 2.0 Manifesto, seguito più recentemente dalla sua definizione di "New Presence". […]
April 26th, 2007 at 8:18 am
[…] was on the first part of the program. I gave a quick presentation on New Presence, a video demo of Talk-Now, and announced our new relationship with JAJAH. Judging by the […]
May 1st, 2007 at 4:25 am
[…] “New Presence†and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto – Alec Saunders .LOG (tags: presence mobile) […]
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
[…] in the VoIP blogs surrounding a manifesto post published by Alec Saunders on Tuesday titled "New Presence" and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto. Alerted to this sweeping discussion about the issues raised by our increasing accessibility as we […]
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 am
[…] has mashed together a whole series of products and ideas from different people (including the New Presence manifesto) to produce this view of the […]
September 28th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
[…] saunderslog.com Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. […]
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
[…] saunderslog.com Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. […]
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:36 pm
[…] saunderslog.com Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. […]
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:28 pm
[…] saunderslog.com Presence will drive a fundamental change in the way that communications networks are used today. […]