Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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.

Sure.  I agree.  Identity is the reason this is a problem.

Identity is a platform, not an application.  Platforms don’t sell themselves.  The applications which depend on those platforms are the drivers which cause adoption of the same.  In “marketing speak”, applications pull platforms through.

New Presence is the answer to the identity problem.   Facile management of communications, based upon transparent and intuitive manipulation of presence, will drive the unification of identity.  In turn, this will pull a common identity platform through to customers.

It should be possible, for instance, to travel to and from Europe, swap SIMs on landing, and have a user-centric presence system — or perhaps identity-centric would be a better term — determine the best place to route calls, and which calls are important, based on location, relationship, network cost and a myriad of other factors.

And — to Ken, Phil and Paul’s points — it should all happen transparently.

Get New Presence right, and identity, by association, must also be fixed.