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There are a few ways to interact with “presence”, some are triangulating or motion via cell towers, others are GPS location, and then there are explicit ways by presence-posting your location.

Motion and “location aware” methods are seen by some as too intrusive; it is found very handy, but at other times invasive, so it has good and bad points.

In contrast posting your availability is you letting others know…without you telling them they will not know where you are or if you are available. Since this is a push method it is not intrusive at all. The difference here is also that you’re not trackable (location aware), your recent locations are as frequent as you like to post them.

This method could be annoying as you are often having to update your availability/location settings…if you don’t update your availability often it may be out of date.
A way around this would be to have a few programmed day sequences
eg. choose “work day” setting, this will program your availability and location for the day (like auto pilot)
- 6am wake up (unavailable)
- 7am train (available)
- 8am work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 1pm lunch (available)
- 2pm work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 5pm train (available)
- etc…

Or perhaps it could be a little less programmed eg. set availability to lunch (available), and ask the phone to revert this back to work (unavailable) in 1 hour.

Examples

Cell tower - Motorola, Google
GPS - Loopt
Presence - Groovr, TwitterWhere

NOTE: Meetro is an IM client that is location aware on your PC, also see RadiusIM (requires no download)…this post is focusing on mobile communications.

Iotum Talk-Now (mentioned before) is a little different as it allows others to visit your profile to see what your status is, and leave a message, and this is what “The Swarm” (mentioned before) is all about, as well as being a virtual room.

Iotum Talk-Now

Specifically for the Blackberry, this is a product that augments the availability scenario and hopes to end phone tag ie. leaving messages/voicemails on each others phones. If we could just see the availability of the person we are calling we could save a lot of time and messiness. Also since we know availability and status we may choose not to call as we don’t want to interrupt.

From their website:

“SHARE your availability without losing control.
SEE who is available and who wants to talk with you.
NOTIFY people you need to talk to and be notified when they become available.”

SHARE - personalize your availability (similar to Instant Messaging status) and calendar…you can also show different availability to different people

SEE - able to see at a glance who is trying to reach you and who is available to talk with you, right now. No need to call someone just to ask if they have time to talk or if you are interrupting them.

NOTIFY - If you visit a contacts profile and they are unavailable, put them on a To-Call list, and Talk-Now will let you know as soon as they become available.

You can also leave a message, the receiver logs in to see this, it’s not pushed or interrupting like usual voicemail/SMS.

They have also teamed up with JahJah for VOIP calls.

Talk-Now is now integrated with the phone address book, so you don’t have to go to the application to find availablity of a contact, also some icons have been revamped…see more changes.

The Swarm

“The Swarm” by Christine Satchell is based on a similar way of dealing with presence/status/availability.
The idea is a way for your contacts/network to see your availability from your profile page and choose the lowest form of interruption.
Instead of ringing/VoiceMail/SMS’g a friend, first check their availability, depending on what their icon and/or text note describes, you may decide to leave a note for the next time they login or check in again later…or their note may be detailed enough to follow without having to explicitly contact them.

So right off the bat you can see how this is built off the IM status idea, and augmented into a more detailed status indicator and profile page.

There is also an element of publishing content, which hearing these words one would assume a social network akin to Facebook mobile, but it’s more about decorating your virtual room with media.

So it’s a way to avoid unnecessary contact and yet still be connected to availability information, and also a way to spontaneously form a group or hook up.

www.pixelshifter.net/client_login/swarm_2007/

The Study

Nomad
Contextualising Mobile Presence with Digital Images (PDF)
ABC Radio National: The Buzz 8 January 2005 - Swarm Phone

In true research methodology a design and test study was set up to deliver a useful product…these days you would probably have a more marketing 2.0 style and give your test users a social network for feedback.

THE NOMAD

The youth culture are always on the move, and don’t often have regular meet up places, it’s more a individual centric lifestyle, very busy, not always at home, on the go, just hook up as it happens…

The idea of a mobile phone and “The Swarm” is a virtual home, no matter where you are physically.
An avatar in your virtual home will represent what you are currently engaged in.

SELECTIVE CONNECTIVITY

A need to be connected without being contacted.
The ability to not be contacted is as important as the ability to be contacted…with the virtual home, this has an improvement on current mobile phone communications, as contacts can see your profile availability without having to disturb you. This is solving an etiquette issue, knowing whether your call or SMS is going to disturb someone before hand is a handy thing to know for both parties.

COMMUNICATE VIRTUALLY AND IDENTITY

A way both sender and receiver can communicate a message without pushing an SMS/VoiceMail/Ring.
This is the main feature of “The Swarm”, the owner of the phone has a choice of avatars to indicate their presence (activity), you can use different avatars for different people (hmmm, us humans are deceiving), and further to this you can leave a message (voice tags) on your avatar, and even push a message to a contacts profile…when the contact will login to their profile they will see the message.
There are also exploding avatars, which revert back to default mode so the user is not constantly updating their status/availability.

In a further design the avatars were replaced with colour coded icons, the coloured bar reveals a mode (status) of the user. eg. choosing the orange coloured bar represents “social”, it displays all the contacts that this user is conveying this status to.
As seen in the screnshot this user is indicating this mode to Ben, Darren, and Vicki. At this point in time this user may be displaying other modes to other people…if we clicked on green for “work” it may display contacts who think this user is at work.

At this stage it seems a bit time consuming to not only remember to set your availablity, but the fact that you can have multiple availability indicators at the same time. I assume there is a “clear all” button to reset your availability to the same for all contacts…maybe organising people in groups would help.

Here’s another screenshot showing what the users contacts are up to now…in this example the contacts (tiny person icon) are coloured, representing status.
Besides the standard colour bar, users can also overlay extra images over the icons to convey more context.

We can see Kym is “asleep” as her avatar is blue, and we see Ben’s avatar as orange, meaning “social” and is overlayed with a “martini glass”, meaning he is having drinks.

Another screenshot of what your contacts are doing now shows the extra images eg. martini glass, plus also user generated images such as photos, etc…

Kym is blue, meaning she is “asleep”, and she has a camera icon “picture” that brings more context to her current activity. Hmm, Kym is saying to this user she is asleep, and pimped up her presence with a photo (as seen below) of her socialising and having drinks during the day…maybe this represents what she last did before going for a long long sleep

Anyway this visual enhancement describes her activity more vividly, perhaps motivating others to join her, those that cannot can see the great time they are missing…all this without explicitly talking to each other.

This is about logging in to communicate and be connected or in the loop to see the latest, you don’t have to be interrupted in the way we currently use our mobile phones.

From this last screenshot we also see that status and availability have been augmented with more context via user generated content such as photo’s, given more of a presence feel…not just an indicator of your presence, but a contextual publishing of presence, similar to the effect of Twitter…I guess you could even use this feature to ask a question.

PUBLISHING CONTENT

Text, images, video can be posted to the walls of your virtual room where others can visit to see, basically a social network type thing like Facebook (but more decorative).

The Scenario

Jade is always on the move….. - Swarm scenario

A mobile phone owners “virtual home” is always on.

- Jade looks in her room
- there’s a note from Sarah
(Sarah would have seen a lecture avatar, signifing that Jade was in a university lecture)
- Jade clicks note and sees a business avatar of Sarah
- Sarah’s avatar has a note tag for Jade
- Jade selects a shopping avatar of herself
- Jade attaches a note tag for when Sarah logs in to “meet her on Collins St”
- Jade then pushes this shopping avatar and note to Sarah’s room
- Jade leaves a lecture avatar in her room, so when others visit her profile they see she is busy

At this point if anyone visited Jade’s room, other than Sarah, they would choose to not bother her as her avatar signifies she is busy in a university lecture.
But Sarah has been pushed a message by Jade, so when Sarah logs in to her own room she will see this note from the Jade shopping avatar…if Sarah looked at her contacts list she would also see a shopping avatar for Jade.

cont…

- Sarah rings Jade to get the exact location
- later on Jade logs in to her room
- 3 friends have left notes

I really like this idea of a non-interrupting type of SMS, only it’s web-based…ie. you login to see your messages rather than be interrupted to view the message.

- Jade clicks on her friends avatars and reads that they want to party.
- Jade changes her avatar to “party” so whoever visits her profile knows her status
- Jade notifies friends she really wants to see by pushing her party avatar and note tag ” come to amber bar” to her friends rooms.

During the night, from what I can gather, Jade is looks at her phone and see’s visitor’s in her room, she is able to hang out with them virtually.
She also decorates her room with pictures and video’s stored in her phone.

Questions

What about inviting contacts into your room for a virtual synchronous chat.

What about if one of your contacts is ringing from someone else’s mobile phone or what about if someone who isn’t your contact rings you…would it be possible to set your phone to not answer and instead send an automatic SMS availbility report. The caller would have to pay for this.

I wonder if a contact has a news activity feed of what their friends have been doing…not only for their publishings, but also a log of their avatar status…at a glance you know what activities your contacts have been doing.
If your contacts are doing something to you, then this would also appear in a Notification stream, a la Facebook.

Instead of SMS/ring them, could I poke/nudge/buzz them to look at my profile, as in Facebook, Twitter, Nimbuzz. But then if I’m nudging them (vibrating their phone to get their attention), I might as well SMS, as this communication costs money just the same.

What about being able to check a profile from the web, so you can check or set availability, send or set a note tag…and also be able to VOIP call from web to mobile phone.
Further to this, what about a web widget, so I can use either of these services in Facebook, or elsewhere.

The way the icons augment presence reminds me of Jaiku…as well as a micro-post you can add an icon to the post to enhance your presence.
Hmmm, what’s Google up to with Jaiku, perhaps a presence network with an availability or status component, just like “The Swarm”.

How is “The Swarm” (TS) different to Facebook mobile (FB), and Instant Messaging (IM)?

Availability indicator
- IM yes
- FB no
- TS yes

IM can only have a colour that says “yes or no”, accompanied with a status message that is “one to many”.
TS has a choice of colours to cover varied availabilties and also an accompaning icon and message, plus you can set multiple statuses at the same time to apply to different people.
FB has a status message, but this is more like a micro post or presence post, it’s not specifically an indicator for availability.
The regular FB on the PC does have a “friends online now” feature, this could be applied to the mobile version and turned into an availability indicator.

Interrupt
- IM no
- FB no
- TS no

IM and TS can first see availability before interrupting.
TS and FB can leave a message without interrupting (FB has both private and public messages).
FB has a “poke” feature which is very non intrusive.

Profile/Publish
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

FB is more about publishing.

Notifications (must look at your profile to see if you have any)
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

TS profile page may show an availability icon and message pushed to your profile by a friend.
TS contacts page allows you to see latest availability of all your friends.
FB home page will list notifications of what people have done to you eg. public or private message, message blasts.
FB Newsfeed informs us of what our friends have been doing to each other, TS could do this with a virtual room update, telling us what friends have published text or media to their room, and what friends have done to each other (not sure if this last one could be applied).

More on presence
Social Presence: Time To Push The Reset Button
Proximity dating is HOT!
Fluc: Put Your Mobile Phone to Work For You
Otetsudai Networks
Mobile motion presence and location awareness
The Mobile Phone as the Globalizing Icon of the Early 21st Century
CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems
3G Multimedia Content Production as Social Communication
‘Sharing Places’, Digital Content and Lived Life

[ADDED 7/2/08: From the Jaiku website:

Jaiku Mobile works like the phone’s regular phone book, and enhances the standard contact list with presence information. It displays the buddy icon, availability, latest Jaiku message, and location for you and your Jaiku contacts in your contact list. It enables you to:

- Browse and post Jaikus
- Add comments
- Share your availability based on your ring profile (green light = ringing, yellow light = vibrate, red light = silent)
- Share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cellular network towers
- Share your calendar events (if you don’t want to share your calendar, Jaiku only displays your status as “busy” when an event is active)
- Share who you’re with based on nearby Bluetooth devices]