Instant Messaging and Presence

Instant Messaging has built up a substantial user base and is finding its place among other forms of communication such as telephony and email. It is near real-time and can offer degrees of efficiency and effectiveness that voice and mail cannot.

Instant Messaging and buddy lists have become closely associated; the concept of the "buddy list" arose out of IM when used in combination with presence. This was popularised by AOL and supported by the ICQ software. A buddy list is a list of known users whose presence, or otherwise, is indicated. If a user is online and available to receive a message an indicator will display this information to other users who have subscribed to that user's presence information. By double-clicking on the name of the user an instant message can be sent in near real-time.

The nature of this communication is less obtrusive than a phone call and consequently IM has found its niche among other more common forms of communication. It is very well suited to immediate, informal but important exchanges of ideas and information among users in a distributed group. Integrating easily with the desktop environment (the clients are usually lightweight), IM can be used as part of the portfolio of personal or business communications.

IM for the enterprise

Both AOL and Yahoo Messenger have established a considerable user community in the business world and enterprise IT managers are beginning to take note. Lotus and Microsoft are deploying IM servers in conjunction with their enterprise platforms and Yahoo is building an IM component into its corporate MyYahoo offering. IM is being integrated with a number of CRM applications and will be used more extensively for out-bound corporate communications.

With SIP, a session can consist of any form of communication so it is possible to promote an IM session to a telephone call or even a whiteboard or video session at the click of a button. Indeed, a number of IM providers are moving towards a VoIP-based "instant telephony" service.

It is also easy to invite other people to join your session, creating spontaneous conference calls. Using third party call control, a conference service could even check the presence status of people due to join a conference and when all the parties are available it could establish the session by connecting them all to a conference bridge.

IM and mobile

The boom of SMS messages shows that there is clearly a precedent for IM in the mobile world. Following 3GPP's decision to utilise SIP as its signalling protocol, SIP is set to be the platform upon which an IM service is based for future mobile deployments. The location and presence facilities inherent in SIP ensure that winning service offerings are a certainty.

Some possible examples of services are: traffic news to your handset, delivery tracking, stockwatch, sales-force tracking, taxi services.

In the shorter term, AOL and Yahoo have announced availability of their clients on the Blackberry devices and are forming partnerships with mobile service providers. There are also a number of IM start-ups that are concentrating solely on wireless.

There is some debate in the world of IM about standardisation of protocols. Take a look in the About SIP section on Related Protocols

Other aspects of presence

In addition to IM, the capabilities of presence will be widely exploited in SIP-based services. As the services running on communications devices are converging, presence information can be used to manage services across different platforms. Instead of indicating presence purely in terms of a PC, presence information can apply to a number of devices and contexts, from traditional IM clients, to mobile devices, to voicemail and email, and plain dumb telephones. Furthermore, there is an increasing trend toward extending presence to independent applications, not just human users, and enabling everything from automatic alerts and notifications to database queries via an instant messaging interface. For example, IBM uses a system of "bots" - buddy lists representing databases and corporate directories and there are a number of start-ups specifically looking at similar ideas.

Presence goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of voice services. A network that has dynamically updated information about a user's preferences and availability can perform more intelligent call routing than today's PSTN or existing find-me/follow-me services. Presence makes the telephone more effective both by adding dynamic information about the user to the static address of the device and by placing it in a broader context of devices. The engaged tone could be a thing of the past with the use of buddy lists.