Chris Sacca's 'What is left?'

Presence Divergence

A friend recently pointed me to a well-crafted post on the blog of Danah Boyd,  the person I consider the preeminent guru of social aspects of interactive, community,  and collaborative experiences  on the web. Danah's writing delved into the diverse and often conflicting approaches many users take  with respect to 'presence' particularly in instant messaging applications. ('Presence' is often defined as a user's ability and preference to communicate and be communicated with at any given time.) Her ideas, which were later echoed in the comments  to her post as well, centered around the struggle many users encounter when trying to find balance between IM as a productivity enhancer and IM as a distraction and how disparate approaches can exacerabte the chasm.

The 'adults' I know who use IM  during the workday have a diverse range of strong opinions about which levels of urgency necessitate IMing and how to manage presence. Some, as Danah noted, only turn on their IM clients for urgent outbound communications, but do not leave them on for anyone to reciprocate. (I will preempt your comments and admit I often guilty of this.) Others leave their clients open all day and  actively manage their away messages to let interested folks know where they are.  Whatever the case, most grown-ups I know are very protective of their time and, if they are so bold as to use the presence features of an IM client at all, they utilize them to  restrict  their availability and otherwise ward off would-be interrupters.

On the extreme other end of the presence continuum are kids. Kids these days will do just about anything they can to invite more communication and relish in the interruption. The kids I know very adroitly manage their AIM away messages to provide extensive information about where they are and how they can be reached. When available to chat, kids can actively manage a dozen or more simultaneous one-on-one chat sessions without issue. They love to type away with friends and friends of friends, and thus see presence as a social lubricant that facilitates more and more interaction.

So, it is in this context that I recently got a tour of the new MSFT Office Communicator  client. While I was not impressed by the UI at all (Y!M takes the cake in this category), it was interesting to learn a bit more about the presence document that the client will populate within MSFT's Live Communications Server. In addition to the traditionally customizable away message that AIM and others offer, the presence document provides the foundation for a layer of presence-based extensibility that could become quite powerful. For starters, the client is integrated  with the calendar functions of Outlook such that the client will provide information about when to expect a user's return and will route incoming calls to a user's desk phone or mobile depending upon location data and follow-me preferences. MSFT also promises to offer APIs that will allow read and write access to the presence document.

I am most interested to see how the developers' community treats presence in the apps they will develop based upon this platform. On one hand, LCS and the Office Communicator are both targeted at the enterprise, and therefore adult users. Will those users continue to use presence prophylactically, that is, as a way to gate communication? Or, as the granularity of presence control presumably improves, will enterprise customers embrace real-time text-based communication as a productivity enhancer and not just mere interruption?
 

 

Diplomatic nuance at its finest

First,  apologies for the extensive slacking that has left my blog in a state of temporal neglect.   I wish I could say I had been surfing far off destinations this entire time. Truth is, I have only been surfing exotic locales part of the time., the rest of the time I have been  inexcusably lazy, and packing surf gear for trips to warm waters.

That said,  while reading the New York Times this past week, I encountered the impetus for my return to the blogosphere. In what was otherwise  a banal article about  US concerns over expansion of China's Navy,  Rumsfeld  was quoted :

"The People's Republic of China is a country that we hope and pray enters the civilized world in an orderly way without the grinding of gears and that they become a constructive force in that part of the world and a player in the global environment that's constructive."

As a graduate of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University,  where we studied the refined art  of diplomatic communication, it is with particular appreciation that I consider the inspired and tactful words of Mr. Rumsfeld.  What delicacy and precision. I mean, mere rookies would have tossed out a laundromat joke or made a gratuitous slanty eye reference. But, Rumsfeld has decades of experience skillfully  offending  others. He excels at trampling years worth of improvement in bilateral understanding and cross-cultural comprehension and has an unmatched knack for revealing American ignorance and xenophobia.

Soon enough, the Pentagon scrambled to nuance Rummy's genius:

"Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said later that Mr. Rumsfeld did not mean to suggest China was not a civilized nation, only that it had been 'an inward-looking government for decades and was now emerging as a global actor.'"

In a similar vein, and actually, in the same newspaper,  was the following thread in a piece regarding a halt to the Israeli practice of destroying the homes of families of Palestinian terrorists:

"A military statement did not say why the policy was being changed, but the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site that Maj. Gen. Udi Shani, who headed a committee reviewing the matter, had challenged the existing military position that demolitions were an effective deterrent. It said he had concluded that the policy had caused Israel more harm than good by generating hatred among the Palestinians."

A clear cut, empirically founded  explanation for the cessation of this practice - Israel's own data says it doesn't work.  Yet, the NYT went on to quote another source :

A military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, offered a slightly different explanation, saying the demolitions were not regarded as necessary during a period of relative calm. "House demolitions are just one measure of deterrence, and at present, it doesn't play the same role that it did previously," the military official said. "It's not something we consider necessary at this time." [emphasis added]

Slightly different?!  These guys couldn't be farther apart on this issue. One says demolitions don't work, but you can barely hear him over the din of the other guy revving up his bulldozer.