When Jabber, Inc.’s far-flung road warriors got caught by the recent snowstorms, presence was our first line of communication. Some stranded travelers wrote custom presence messages such as “stuck in Dallas, call my mobile”. Others used mobile IM to see who was available at headquarters to help them make new travel arrangements. In one case, colleagues on separate trips were able to meet up to share a rental car back home. With presence so ingrained into the Jabber, Inc. culture, no one was unaccounted for and people got help in real-time.

With the New Year, Jabber, Inc. enters its eighth year in the presence business, so it isn’t surprising that we use presence technology almost instinctively. What I find surprising is that there are so many organizations that are entirely presence-free. Sure, plenty of people are using enterprise and public IM to get their work done more efficiently, but typically, presence is only used to see if someone is available for a phone call or IM session. This situation is going to change radically in 2007.

I hereby go on the record boldly predicting that 2007 will be the Year of Presence in mainstream IT. Business decision-makers and IT professionals will realize that it is imperative to presence-enable communications and business processes, just as it was imperative to network-, then Web-enable business applications and processes in the 1990s. Be presence-enabled or be square. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The principal catalyst will likely be telephony, the technology invented 130 years ago, in the Centennial year of the United States. All forms of real-time communications benefit from presence and phone calls are the mainstream real-time communications medium. As digital telephony makes deeper inroads into the enterprise, presence will tag along and become integrated into the basic infrastructure of business.

While there will be growth in the business use of IM, that isn’t my point. The high-order bit is that from this point forward, real-time presence will be a basic information technology requirement. It all started with the dialtone. In the Web 1.0 era, Scott McNealy coined the term “big friggin’ WebTone switch” to capture the imperative of Web-enablement.

We are now entering the mainstream presence era, where aggregating and pervasively embedding presence becomes a business-critical IT mandate, just as becoming Web-enabled was back when Scott McNealy first spoke about Webtones. Jabber, Inc. has a programmable and scaleable real-time presence engine, which is an excellent foundation for the Big Friggin’ Presence Switch.

Best wishes for a happy, prosperous and presence-enabled New Year!

Goodness gracious, social networking is so in that it is a key element of Time’s Person of the Year!

Whenever something gets hot, there is bound to be backlash. Enter the concept of anti-social networking, which has been gaining momentum in the blogosphere following the explosion of social networking sites. This movement is the antithesis of social networking, as presented in anti-networking sites (some starting as sarcastic jibes) such as isolatr and snubster, where you can create a list of people to erase from your communications sphere of influence.

It may seem counterintuitive, but just as presence is key to effective social networking sites, presence is also critical for anti-social networking. You have to know the presence of specific people, places and things if you want to avoid undesirable situations. Or at least, you need to know they are not where you are. The announcement of a child-tracking service using GPS-enabled mobile phones has set off predictable teeth-gnashing about privacy concerns. I’m concerned about privacy, but this type of service doesn’t send me into Orwellian cold sweats. I have quite the opposite reaction. If the network knows where I am, it can help me avoid undesirable situations, such as crowds, traffic jams and yes, even people that I would just as soon avoid. If used creatively, presence technology can enhance privacy.

The anti-social pioneers tend to be a bit harsh, writing about things they despise, abhor, detest, etc. This extremism runs the risk of throwing a useful concept out with the hatemongering bathwater. Anti-social networking can be useful - even among friends! Most humans, at least occasionally, want to do things alone or with a very specific other person. Or, an activity that might be fun with a few people, becomes grueling when the crowds packs in. Presence information can help run the interference necessary to achieve these ends.

Social networks form communities of people with mutual interests. But what happens when mutual interests conflict? When you are after a resource in short supply, letting your friends know your plans could be counterproductive. The law of supply and demand can be cruel when supply is limited and something comes up to drive demand…such as a discussion within your social network. If I want a quiet vacation on a secluded beach is it wise to share my plans with all of my buddies? Are tickets tight for a game or concert? Then it’s probably not a good idea to chat about going until I’ve bought my own tickets.

Then there is the benefit of exploiting low-priced resources in good supply - getting a deal on things in times of abundance. I want my week at a secluded beach house, but at a low price. So I get a deal on the house because I am notified in real-time that someone just cancelled their reservation. That’s a presence change: From reserved, or not available, to available, by the way.

How about avoiding the crowds to have a better shopping, dining, entertainment, travel, etc. experience? Consider the class distinctions in air travel. First Class means more personal space, better food and less hassle…a better service experience, in other words. What if there were ways for companies to provide a superior service experience to their customers, just by letting them know when they can enjoy more privacy, quiet and elbow-room? Enterprises that figure this out are going to have some of the most loyal customers and profit handsomely from their efforts.

The concept of load balancing - allocating work to resources with spare capacity - has been around for a long time. From movie matinees to grid computing, profitable efficiencies are realized by utilizing otherwise slack resources. The quantitative gains have been studied and documented in operations research and systems management disciplines.

But the brave new opportunities are qualitative: The focus is on providing a better experience for humans, instead of machine utilization improvements or optimized process efficiency. This brings us back to the secluded beach vacation. The current model follows first class air travel - I want space, I pay for it. But the new presence-enabled model lets me find times and places where the beach is most likely to be all mine - without additional charge to me, but with incremental revenue to the owner of the house.

I hope I don’t see you there!

Right Model Wrong Architecture vs Right Architecture Wrong Model

…Or more simply Microsoft vs Google

Interesting remarks from Bill Gates chronicled by Liz Gannes of GigaOm.

According to Liz:

We each got to ask Gates one question. I asked which applications he forecast to live within the browser and which outside of it.He replied that the distinction would come to be silly from a technical standpoint, but that the necessary movement toward web APIs does present challenges on the business side. “One of the things that’s actually held the industry back on this is, if you have an advertising business model, then you don’t want to expose your capabilities as a web service, because somebody would use that web service without plastering your ad up next to the thing.”

His solution wasn’t very specific: “It’s ideal if you get business models that don’t force someone to say ‘no, we won’t give you that service unless you display something right there on that home page.”

Then for the tease: “And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.”

Interesting in a few respects. On the closing quote, we were talking with a journalist yesterday who reminded us that way back when Microsoft was making the case that the Internet was just an extension of WindowsNT. Hmmm…

All kidding aside, I think Bill is definitely onto something here. If apps and data are going to primarily live in the cloud and we’re going to access them as Live Services, there are two fundamental issues that must be dealt with (and probably many more as well).

1) Scale of the presence engine. Live Services need presence, and making everything live exponentially increases the number of “presentities” (the network nodes and data streams on the network that publish and subscribe to presence information). This is no longer one person one device type presence but one person many devices, many applications, data stores, etc. How well presence scales becomes super relevant in this scenario.

2) You’ve got to have an extraordinary level of trust in the provider of Live Services that they are going to protect your data and deliver services when you need them.

Google presents a real challenge to Microsoft because they have already embraced Live Services and have the infrastructure and architecture to roll them out broadly. But…do you trust a company with an advertising model to protect your privacy and other data? They make their living off of selling your information after all.

Microsoft on the other hand has an infrastructure and architecture that doesn’t lend itself very well to rolling out Live Services. Its applications are heavy and its development model (Ray Ozzie’s initiatives notwithstanding) has not proven itself nimble in a “Web 2.0” sense. That said, they don’t rely on advertising and have a history of providing trusted (albeit security deficient) applications.

At present, there is no one company covering these issues comprehensively. Microsoft must build scalable presence, Google must build trust. At Jabber, Inc. we’re watching this looming battle with the inherent interest of an arms dealer.

Lots of analysis on IBM’s federation announcement with AIM, Yahoo!, and Google Talk.

I especially enjoyed Mike Gotta’s supposition that IBM might be laying the foundation for “a multi-protocol presence server that could integrate with a variety of signaling interfaces. Nahhhh….”

This gets at the concept of decoupling presence from any one application, so that no application owns presence but each uses it to publish and subscribe to live data.

Mike points out here that IBM’s federation announcement (particularly as it relates to Google Talk which is XMPP-based) “signals that there are no technical barriers for similar XMPP interoperability issues within intranets as well.”

A few notes for IBM customers:

a) this is the beauty of XMPP…the federation that works for Google Talk will work with any XMPP implementation. To test an oversimplification go to Meebo.com and enter your user ID and password in the Google Talk box…If your XMPP server is accessible over the Internet, you will be able to log in. Extended to an IBM shop…deploy any XMPP service on your network and the new SameTime gateway will work.

b) Jabber, Inc. has already built a multi-protocol presence server that integrates with a variety of signaling interfaces at carrier-grade scale with military-grade security. The flexibility of XML and XMPP means that IBM shops can presence-enable new and existing network services by adding Jabber XCP™ and it will work with the existing SameTime front-end.

Interoperability means more choices and we’re thrilled to see IBM further embrace open standards.