Yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Presence 2.0“. Since the panel included some of the usual suspects from various past discussions, I decided to use the 2.0-ness of the title as an excuse to share some of the things we’ve been thinking about what presence might mean in the future. In particular, that we as an industry tend to make the problem too hard. Once users have several hundred people on their contact list, their desire for tweaky rules and individual configuration options starts to wane.
One way around this is a concept I’ve started calling “EigenPresence” (it’s important enough to me that I re-branded my blog to reflect the concept). The reputation for my digital identity is made up of multiple small pieces (on/offline, geographic location, mood, etc.), which can be combined into a single presence stream. If you were to integrate this stream over time, you would have the reputation associated with my identity. To answer Alec’s question, yes, I see Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the like as different bits that get integrated into this stream to build up my reputation.
I’ve posted my slide deck(5.6MB) from the panel, if you’d like to see them.
