2006 December 28 | Alec Saunders

Got home tonight, had a lovely ham dinner, and settled down to the PC with a pint of beer in my hand.Â I just about spit my beer out my nose at what I read next.Â Remember that fellow Thomas Scriven? The W-Group spammer I wrote about yesterday, who sent me a pitch letter marked confidential?Â Well, here’s what he wrote back next:

From: Thomas Scriven
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 8:09 PM
To: alecs@exmsft.com
Subject: Hey Alec

Alec, In accordance with my confidentiality agreement between our companies, please remove all reference to my personal information off your blog ( www.saudersblog.com ) immediately. RegardsÂ Â Â
Thomas Scriven

The W-Group
1119 Colorado Ave, Suite 103
Santa Monica, CA 90401

This message and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the addressee. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately. Any unauthorized use, alteration or dissemination is prohibited.

This is Darwin at his finest, ain’t it?

Time for a little education, kiddies.Â Just ’cause you mark it confidential doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to treat it that way, unless you have a confidentiality agreement with that company or individual.

I don’t want to be a jerk here.Â I actually find the services he offers, in the Iowa 712 area code, interesting.Â Moreover, his pitch — that he is using USF subsidized services to provide long distance for disadvantaged families — is even compelling.Â And by focusing on the Hispanic market, who are historically the heaviest users of calling card services in order to be able to phone home to family in South and Central America, he may actually have hit on a great market to sell these services too.

Just find another way to reach the blogging community, Tommy.Â Spam isn’t the answer.

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I’ve had a fascinating backburner conversationÂ concerning the role of calendaring in the New Presence model.Â Calendars are a marvelously rich source of input to New Presence engines, including:

Whether the calendar owner is generally free or busy at the moment.
What the calendar owner is doing, and potentially alsoÂ with whom.
The expected location of that activity.
The expected duration of that activity.

The first two inputs are very valuable.Â Location and duration, however, are less reliable, as they are mere expectations.Â Who, after all, hasn’t had a meeting go long, or be cut short early?Â Happens all the time.

But are calendars good metaphors for exposing presence information?Â Microsoft has experimented with that metaphor some, butÂ alas it is a flawed metaphor. How do I show the presence information of my 300 or so “buddies” in a sufficiently dense format to make it useful?Â How do I show unscheduled conversations?

To be clear, the buddy list is also a flawed metaphor.Â Who really cares what my 300 “buddies” are doing right now?Â What I really want to know is whether the people I need to communicate with are available when I need to talk.

The time is ripe for another application metaphor for exposing presence.Â

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