Thursday, June 26, 2008

Communication Overflow

Shai Tsur of Giza writes about worse communication, and joins a few other blogs that write about information overflow that we're seen these days.

The fact that we live through an age of information overflow is quite known. The growth rate of web pages, blogs posts and rss feeds and other sources of information is very hard to follow. There are many technological solutions that try to help us, like Outbrain and some parts of the Google Reader.

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But that's only the beginning. What about all of our profiles in different social networks? What about our profile in different enterprise social networks (like IBM's Lotus Connections)? And the important information (or is it?) that our family, friends and colleagues (aka contacts) create?

Some people define presence as my current status, or even my Instant Messenger status line, I believe mostly because this is where it started to get popular. Once I set with Jeff Pulver and Ohad Pressman and we defined it once as near real time thing: it describes you but it's not that important if it's now, 5-10 min from now, or even by the end of the day, because presence is not only your status, it's also how you feel, what your near term plans are (I'm going to lunch soon!) etc.

Some people took presence and added location to it, calling it context. I'm not quite sure why the location itself changes the essence of presence - for me it's just another aspect of it. Presence is who I am, around now. Part of who I am is where I am.

These days I'm wondering where it would all lead. I'm wondering who will control my presence information: would it be me, or my friends, or maybe some kind of combination of the two?

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