The Power Of Instant Messaging And Presence Awareness Across Platforms And Protocols

The synchronous (real-time) presence of peer-group members can significantly augment our abilities to escalate communications with near or distant teammates and to more rapidly evaluate how to resolve just-in-time problematic issues.

Among the innovative and forwarding technologies I am showcasing here at Kolabora, one important space must be reserved for the outstanding work being done inside the academic world, by those who, under the labels of Knowledge Management, Semantics or Human Factors are looking with true interest and appropriate mindset at the issues of what online collaboration really means.

Undistracted by issues of "time-to-market", technology preferences or legacies, some of these exceptional researchers have been working hard at understanding and prototyping the features and facilities needed by tomorrow online collaborative virtual teams.

While academic tools may not have the slick and fancy looks of some of the more commercial offerings, they are generally Open Source, free, and in the case of the tool being showcased this time, absolutely ahead of the commercial solutions in understanding first where major new opportunities to make these technologies more useful really are.

To promote the deployment of next-generation presence-awareness tools in collaborative environments, the KMi of the UK Open University has implemented an open-source cross-platform Instant Messaging and geo-location tool called BuddySpace, which provides multiple views of collaborative workgroups based on the concept of 'active dots on geographically-accurate detailed maps', and augmented by a variety of semantically-based services.

BuddySpace is being deployed in several innovative contexts, including distributed computing projects and distance learning courses at The Open University in order to create new models of peer collaboration for sharing the right knowledge with the right people in the right places at the right time.

One of the key factors that led to the widespread popularity of Instant Messaging applications from 1997 onwards (including ICQ, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Odigo, and Jabber messengers) was the concept of pushed presence: the automatic notification of the appearance of friends and colleagues online.

However, Instant Messaging (IM) is just one of many possible presence-related and presence-dependent applications. For example, presence-enabled applications can facilitate safety-tracking of children by mobile phone, support for emergency services, blind-date radar, group teleconference management, multiplayer games, and anything involving the collaboration of individuals separated in space and time.

Why phone a contact only to receive an engaged tone or pre-recorded message, when the telephone network already knows what state your contact is in, and could indicate this directly on your contact list?

All of these concepts embody varying degrees of what we refer to as enhanced presence management.

The concept of presence has matured in recent years to move away from the simple notion of 'online/offline/away', towards a rich blend of attributes that can be used to characterise an individual's physical and/or spatial location, work trajectory, time frame of reference, mental mood, goals, and even intentions!

The challenge indeed is how best to characterise presence, how to make it easy to manage and easy to visualise, and how to remain consistent with the user's own expectations, work habits, and existing patterns of Instant Messaging and other communication tool usage.

BuddySpace is a new powerful collaboration technology built on a strong IM core with four novel twists:

(1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations;

(2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others;

(3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform;

(4) it is Open Source, so it is 100% free with full sources readily available. BuddySpace provides a compelling user interface that can be highly compact, yet provide users with an important 'feel-good' factor, akin to seeing nearby office lights turned on when entering one's office building at night.

Marc Eisenstadt, chief scientist at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in the UK says:

The nice thing with BuddySpace is the 'feelgood' factor: like returning to the office late at night and seeing a few key lights on, knowing that certain people are in... more compelling with an office layout rather than a list...even better is your perceptual ability to spot the ABSENCE (or 'busy state', etc) of someone at a glance on a map you know, rather than having to scan a list...even a well-organised hierarchy is hard to scan rapidly.

What Problems Does BuddySpace Address?

* Collaborative knowledge work often relies on opportunistic interactions; for remote collaborators, such interactions need to be kept simple, meaningful, relevant, and manageable.

* Popular Instant Messaging tools (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!) are effective in their niche but fail to address meaningful knowledge exchange and coherent workgroup practice, e.g. the ability quickly to find the right source of key knowledge according to stored interest and geographical profiles.

* Knowledge workers are largely unfamiliar with (or even uncomfortable with) the unique opportunities afforded by high-impact, low-effort, low-bandwidth, large-scale communication capabilities.

* Presence awareness requires more than knowing 'online/offline/away/busy' status: some grounding in geographical reality and an enriched presence-signalling capability could pay huge dividends.

* Collaborative knowledge work of course involves people-people interaction, but there is more: knowing the status of devices, locations, and documents can be just as important.

Towards a Solution

BuddySpace aims to provide enhanced capabilities for users to manage and visualise the presence of colleagues and friends in collaborative working, gaming, messaging, and other contexts.

Of particular interest is the role of graphical metaphors for presence, including maps, logical layouts such as building schematics and project timelines and abstract artistic layouts such as graffiti walls.

The team developing BuddySpace is also actively looking at the semantics of presence, in order to move beyond simple flags such as 'online' and 'busy' to include rich contextual and spatio-temporal information more appropriate to one's focus of activity. The snapshots below (click to enlarge), and the brief overview which follows, highlight our approach.

BuddySpace generalizes the concept of 'Buddy List' (popularised by Instant Messaging tools such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger) to provide multiple views of collaborative workgroups according to users' needs and tastes.

The key aim has been to provide a personal 'dashboard' or 'radar screen' so that one can observe the availability and 'interaction state' of colleagues worldwide in a manner that exhibits the following desirable properties:

Immediate: real-time updates need to be pushed instantly to users rather than pulled in by request -- the push approach helps keep updates more palpable and informative

Peripheral and therefore non-intrusive: users lead busy lives, and dislike being bombarded with yet more information, so we aim to keep awareness of colleagues available in a compact manner that can be noticed peripherally

Customisable: some people prefer simple or hierarchical lists, some prefer visual maps, some prefer status lights, and so on; some prefer a 'Windows' look-and-feel, some a 'Mac'-- we need to cater for diverse user preferences and capabilities

Scaleable: we have to provide ways to indicate the presence of potentially enormous numbers of people, even given that these numbers will be filtered down for personal use -- researchers inhabit workspaces with many hundreds of colleagues around the globe; the Open University has well over 150,000 students online; large peer-spaces like music swapping communities have many millions of users connected simultaneously

Interoperable: with several hundred million users of the 'Big Four' (AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!), it is crucial that any approach allow interopebility with systems to which our users already subscribe; this is one of the many reasons we built BuddySpace entirely on top of Jabber, which provides gateways to the 'Big Four' products.

Cross-platform: we need to service a community not only on Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac desktop and notebook configurations, but also on PDAs and mobile phones -- we therefore develop entirely in Java

XML-literate: for future intelligent applications, communication transport needs to be about more than just string-transmission; another we adopted Jabber is that it is based entirely on a generic XML transport architecture, ideally suited for this purpose.

Open source: for the research community to join us and to gain leverage via our research output, we have ensured that BuddySpace is open source, available on SourceForge.

Clean: BuddySpace adheres rigorously to the Jabber specification, which means that it interoperates with other Jabber clients and servers without danger of the rogue behaviour that non-standard implementations inadvertently allow (e.g. the semantics of users inhabiting multiple groups is undefined in some clients, and can cause crashes).

Extendable: BuddySpace deploys a plug-in architecture which means that additions, such as new visualizations, and new concepts such as gaming interfaces, are readily achievable.

BuddySpace provides a compelling user interface that can be highly compact, yet provide users with an important 'feel-good' factor, akin to seeing nearby office lights turned on when entering one's office building at night.

By studying the semantics of presence, we can also augment the existing impoverished presence states in a principles manner, providing capabilities that are more representative of the way real users work.

Forthcoming capabilities will include automatic location updates via mobile devices, and the use of semantic matchmaking via intelligent profile handling (enhanced social networking), in order to help users quickly find and filter colleagues of particular interest.

To find out more please see:
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/buddyspace/

Research issues as Presence and Semantics are covered here.

Download BuddySpace 2.5 for Windows/Unix/Linux/Mac here.

An interesting and well prepared overview presentation is accessible here.

Quick Start Guide and video tours of BuddySpace immediately accessible here.

The FAQ page is accessible here

An online forum is accessible at:
http://jabber.open.ac.uk/BB-forum/

See also:

BuddySpace How Cool Is This? by Ray Grieselhuber's

BuddySpace by Jon Udell

There are so many applications for this by Marc Canter