Phil Windley says that we’re going to need better identity structures before the New Presence can emerge. He asks whether there is a business need which is strong enough to drive presence all by itself. Ken Camp’s lengthy post The Present Known as Presence can be distilled down to the same question: is presence enough?  Paul Jardine also concludes that identity is the issue.
Sure. I agree. Identity is the reason this is a problem.
Identity is a platform, not an application. Platforms don’t sell themselves. The applications which depend on those platforms are the drivers which cause adoption of the same. In “marketing speak”, applications pull platforms through.
New Presence is the answer to the identity problem.   Facile management of communications, based upon transparent and intuitive manipulation of presence, will drive the unification of identity. In turn, this will pull a common identity platform through to customers.
It should be possible, for instance, to travel to and from Europe, swap SIMs on landing, and have a user-centric presence system — or perhaps identity-centric would be a better term — determine the best place to route calls, and which calls are important, based on location, relationship, network cost and a myriad of other factors.
And — to Ken, Phil and Paul’s points — it should all happen transparently.
Get New Presence right, and identity, by association, must also be fixed.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Hi Mr. Saunders. I only recently discovered your blog but I am already a rabid fan! Pls keep up the great work!
I am responding to this particular post of yours because I thought you might like to know about the work of Mr. Lee Dryburgh over at http://www.connectioncommons.org where he deals heavily with digital identity systems. To quote form his site, they are in to…
Emerging digital identity technologies including:
OpenID (which now includes SXIP, LID, and Yadis, plus support for XRI & i-names)
XRI and XDI (includes i-names and i-numbers)
SAML
Liberty Alliance
CardSpace and WS-*
Higgins (it is an API, not a protocol like the other five)
Just thought the two of you might have a thing or two to chat about!
Best regards,
Rene Ylanan
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