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This paper takes a look at the Presence service and explores its meaning and usefulness from a layman's perspective. It explores how the service is useful for the users and how is it different from other similar services that are available today. |
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Presence
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Phone Book
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Presence for Services
| 'Presence' Presence provides information about a person's availability or reachability. It tells whether and how a certain person can be contacted at this moment. Components of this information includes " user status e.g. available, unavailable, in a meeting etc. " graphic content e.g. photograph " location e.g. home, office, Atlanta etc " client device availability e.g. my phone is on/off, in a call etc. " client device capabilities e.g voice, text, GPRS, multimedia etc. " searchable personal statuses such as mood e.g. happy, angry " Other personal information like hobbies etc.
'Messaging' Messaging is a two-way SMS or paging service, through which a user, say User A, sends a short message (usually 160 characters) to another user B, or a group of users. The receiving party receives the text message on his Messaging Client, and can send a similar short message in response. The service can be extended to include other forms of content besides text messages, e.g. photos, video clips, file etc, all of which can be send/shared from one user to another. Messaging service typically includes 'chat groups' as well, in which a content sent by one user is visible to a 'group' of users simultaneously. "Presence" does not involve any content exchange (text, graphics, video etc) between two users, and "messaging" does not necessarily require the recipient to be present for receiving the content immediately. E.g. several messaging clients like yahoo, allow a user A to send a message to user B, even when the user B is logged off. The user B can see all his offline messages when he logs on to messenger service next time. To better understand the difference between the two, imagine logging onto a chat client, without really sending any message. You can see the online/offline status of all your friends/contacts, and get notifications about their logging-in/logging-out, without really having any communication with them. Here, you are using the "presence" service (without the Messaging service) The integration between presence and messaging service is so deep rooted that the two are usually taken together even in technical forums. i.e. technical bodies responsible for standardizing services/protocols etc., usually have a single, integrated work group for Presence and Messaging services. For example, OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) has a workgroup called SIMP (Simple Instant Messaging and Presence), IETF has a workgroup called SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging). Similarly, many other technical bodies and developer forums consider presence and messaging together and develop common integrated APIs. Though messaging is tightly coupled with 'presence', and the two are usually viewed as a single co-joined service, there are other services that depend on a user's availability and use 'presence' as input. Some examples of such services are given below: 'Push-to-Talk' PTT service is similar to a "walkie-talkie" application where a user presses a button to talk with an individual user or broadcast to a group of participants. The receiving participants hear the sender's voice either without any action on their part, for example, without having to answer the call or may be notified and has to accept the call before he can hear the sender's voice. Other participants can respond to this message once this initial speech is complete. The communication is half-duplex, that is to say, at most one person can talk at a time and all other participants hear the speech. (This contrasts with voice calls, which are full duplex, where more than one person can talk at a time.) 'Gaming' Gaming service enables a group of users to play a game, and even compete, using separate hand-held devices. Each user has the same information about the current status of game, and a move made by one user is immediately notified to other players. Such games have been prolific on mobile devices since the advent of Bluetooth technology. 3G networks take this service a step further by enabling geographically separated users to play and compete with each other. |
| Each of these services require another person's availability. E.g. before starting a network game, you need to know, which all players are available for a game. Similarly for a push-to-talk session, you need to know, who all are currently tuned in to the conversation. All such services use 'Presence' at the backend. So, why not take 'Presence' out of these services and make it a separate, individual service? Good Question! That's where a Presence Enabled Phonebook comes into the picture, which is touted as a must-have in next generation mobile phones, and other hand-held devices, providing high-end mobile services. So, what exactly is a Presence-enabled Phonebook? Presence-enabled Phonebook is nothing but a phonebook, with an added ability to show the availability of the contacts through various means of communication like messaging, push-to-talk etc. It allows contacts to be grouped on the basis of services like PoC, IM etc or better usability and also allows nesting one group within another. The presence enabled hand held devices usually have separate menu items for services like messaging, push-to-talk, gaming etc., and a separate menu item for 'Presence'. A user can log on to the Presence service, check availability of contacts for various means of communication and accordingly log on to the service, by which their communication needs can be fulfilled. |
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Presence Enabled Phone Book |
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