Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts

Monday, December 29, 2008

The Presence of 2008

The year is ending and with it come the old year review and the new year's resolutions. I love these times.. you get to just sit and think on what happened and what the future holds..

I'm sitting and writing this post, while watching twitter popups via my favorite desktop client (Twhirl). I'm doing that because there's a mini war going on in south Israel right now, and this is where I grew up, where my parents still live actually. As I'm writing this, they announce the area a closed military environment.

Twitter is a big hit. In Israel, my friend Niv Calderon suspects there are around 1000 users in Israel there's no way of really knowing, but the last few days will probably bring more people in: most of the breaking news are coming from this presence server. True, there's a lot of extra information, chats, PR, but there are also many updates much faster than even the fastest news sites (I'm not talking about the TV).

Which brings me back to the resolutions thing. Presence is here to stay, and it was proven in the Obama campaign (that is very poorly replicated in Israel now). The economic crises will be the final step that is needed: people will learn how to make money of it, I'm sure. I have a few ideas of my own that I wrote about in my Hebrew blog, and I will post more about it later here. I know less and less people that are avoiding using and publishing their presence on line - even people that left Facebook in the past for privacy reasons are now coming back - you can't avoid it - it's affecting our lives too much and you just miss out if you're not there. The move is almost complete - digital presence is almost equal, or least a huge part, for physical presence.

In the field of XMPP vs. SIP, the question is harder. Tsahi Levent-Levi writes about it in SIMPLE vs. XMPP Showdown and reaches the same conclusion I did at the beginning of 2008: "We will end up with two different presence protocols - one dominant with Internet companies (XMPP) and the other by service providers and unified communication vendors (SIMPLE).".  Today I feel differently: In the field of presence and IM (and event related implementations) XMPP will win. It will not happen in 2009, companies have invested too much in SIP, and it will not happen in legacy systems, MMS, VOIP. It will happen where XMPP shines as a simple (pun intended), standard, easy to use (very important!) protocol - that instead of getting extended more and more - is using other standards when possible (for example, OAuth for authentication). And I'll explain why:

Simple - XMPP is XML based. This brings with it some good and some bad news. The point I'm making here is that those news are KNOWN. Some have solutions (offloading XML processing for better performance, for example) and some don't, but the field is very wide and keeps getting better (since there are many people looking to improve it). By doing it's not only much easier to learn XMPP, it will improve faster too.

Standard - SIP is standard, but it's the bad type of standard: It's a standard made by the SIP community for the SIP community. The XMPP standard uses other known standards and re-uses them in a way that suits the needs.

Easy to use - I also refer to as 'easy to learn' - what is easy to learn and use will become more popular, period.

Another point on XMPP as wining the Internet and the SIP wining the mobile/cellular - the Internet will eventually win the mobile, if it hadn't already. What does that tell you about the protocol that won the Internet?

Happy new year and world peace!

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Your presence and your relationships

Your every day presence and the way you present it changes by the person that is viewing your presence. You don't always express your feelings to the man in the grocery store. You smile when you're sad when meeting strangers, and most of the time, the closer the person is to you, the closer they get to the inner circle of your presence.

Digital presence is not that different. We have so many ways to express it, and we usually choose different ways to express different presence information to different crowds.

I have Facebook chat, Facebook status, Facebook messages, Twitter, Twitter direct messages, email, sms, gtalk, MSN messenger, phone and face 2 face. Without noticing, I created a strict hierarchy in those options that is related to my circles.

My outmost circle, people are hardly know or don't have any direct contact with, I use mostly Facebook. Facebook messages for me is the less favorite way of communication. FB Chat is also down there - only for people I can't chat with any other way.

After that circle, comes the people I know better. I have their MSN (mostly old friends and MS freaks), I follow them (and sometimes they even follow me) on Twitter. At the top of that list are my gtalk friends - people I actually emailed in the past. Emails are also high up there - I don't often write people long messages that are not work related. If you're getting one, I have a lot to say to you, and the bonus is double - you get my email and get into my gtalk :)

Then of course, SMS, phone and f2f, in that order, which are on the border between digital and physical.

How is your list ordered?

Sunday, July 20, 2008

The way chat was, is, will be

Digital chat started out years ago, almost at the same place, and immediately diverged into two groups. Ubique and ICQ, both Israeli startups that were later bought by American corporations (AOL bought ICQ and Ubique, which later was bought back and re-sold to Lotus, and eventually ended up as part of IBM).

Ubique brought the idea of enterprise PIM server and product, while ICQ brought the same idea to the Internet. In a way both were equally successful, yet ICQ much more famous.

In those days, the difference between the product was pretty straightforward. Enterprise PIM brought security, command and control (always a requirement from CIO's around the world) and the sense of trust - you knew who you were talking to on the other side, and you know that while they (mostly) talked business, they would not be hackers and crackers, or other evil entities.

Public PIM, on the other hand, brought the possibility of connecting to new people, chatting for fun and pleasure, connecting, and getting yourself out there in a way that was never possible before: immediate and easy. You were not required to be technically savvy (like IRC) and you could chat and pass information quickly and easily (much more than email, forums, etc).

The coming of social networks brought some change to that. With the popularity of MySpace and Facebook, and with Facebook bringing the concept of real identity social network to the larger population, and then chatting within your social network, we received a kind of combination between public networks, not related to our business, not controlled and monitored (we hope) in the same way enterprise PIM can (and sometimes are) controlled, with the option of adding people WE choose to the network, and yet - receiving some kind of security and trust - only we allow people in, they are mostly identified by real identities, and with some minor care and responsibility - it's not that hard to identify the hoaxes and fakes out there.

From here, it's not yet decided what will happen. Social networks are going into the organization, enterprise PIM are stepping out. Mobile social networks and chats are changing, creating a new market that also quickly tries to enter the web and enterprise, and vice versa. We hear stories of startups creating 'facebook for the enterprise'. We hear about enterprise social network being hosted and offered to the public and the enterprise at the same time (ning offers something like that). I guess it's the mixup before they all become one big market. Our digital world will be one. What new ideas will come from it?

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Digital Presence

What is presence, really? Is it my status line on my favorite IM client(s)? My status line in Facebook, or maybe in Twitter? Maybe my real presence is not even digital - it's where I am, what I feel, what I plan.. is presence actually me, in real time, or is it like we usually call it - near real time, which basically mean that a few tens of minutes later are the same as true real time?

Wikipedia poorly defines presence as "current communication status" (here), but in way better itself under the definition of telepresence:

Lombard and Ditton (1997) went a step further and enumerated six conceptualizations of presence. First, they wrote, presence can be sense of social richness, the feeling one gets from social interaction. Second, presence can be a sense of realism, such as computer-generated environments looking, feeling, or otherwise seeming real. Third, presence can be a sense of transportation. This is a more complex concept than the traditional feeling of one being there. Transportation also includes users feeling as though something is “here” with them or feeling as though they are sharing common space with another person together. The fourth concept is that presence can be a sense of immersion, either through the senses or through the mind. Fifth, presence can provide users with the sense they are social actors within the medium. No longer passive viewers, users, via presence, are given a sense of interactivity and control. The sixth and final concept is that presence can be a sense of the medium as a social actor.

And if we could define Presence, will it tell us where it's going? Is digital presence slowly copying the real world presence, and slowly catching up, or is it defining a whole new thing? Will the end result be some kind of combination of historical presence coming together with digital presence? Is the field and how we view it constantly changing?

And lets not forget - how does it really work? What are the underlying protocols the make our presence work? What is the difference between them, and why use one or the other? What services are out there that help us achieve presence, who makes them and how..

This blog comes to discuss all of these subjects and more. I've decided to do this one in English and not Hebrew (unlike my other blogs) in order to possibly increase the crowd that can read and reply. Welcome!