Don’t give “presence” too much credit…
Just a quick nugget to think about regarding presence…. This January 2 posting, linked from from Planet Jabber got me thinking
"...One way to manage interruptions is through the active management of one’s presence. At Jive, if you set your presence to “Do Not Disturb”, most people will avoid messaging you unless it is critical. When you really need focused time, “Do Not Disturb” can be invaluable...."
The article isn’t exclusively about presence per se, but it highlight a commonly touted “feature” of IM. In instant messaging and chat applications “presence” is the ability for the end-user to set automated signs or messages such as “I’m available” or “Do not disturb”. This presence is seen by others on the IM network and is allegedly useful to control when you can be interupted by others, etc. I contend that presence is dramatically overrated. Most IM and presence systems allow the end-user to manually set their own presence. That is, to hang out the proverbial “do not disturb” sign. Of course, that would seem to be very appealing – you can ostensibly control when someone bugs you.
I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority on this, but ‘presence’ is overrated. Any system that allows the end-user to set their presence can and will be gamed by that end-user. If I know you can set your message to “Away”, for example, who says I should trust it? This kind of “utility” invites abuse. How many phone calls are not returned or emails unresponded to because someone didn’t want to commit to something or didn’t want to hear bad news? I am perhaps being a bit unkind, but giving the user this capability invites that same kind of avoidance behavior.
The better systems are those which either automatically set presence based on screen saver activity, for example, or even better indicate the actual end-user idle time. If chat shows me that a user has been inactive for 4 hours, I can probably assume she’s been in meetings or maybe has already left for the day. And if that person is active but not responding to my messages, I know something is amiss.
So this is a bit of a rant – but manually-settable presence is gameable, and anything gameable undermines the network effect. Abuse of presence as I predict it will undermine trust in presence and hence ultimately drive users off of chat/IM and back to other alternatives.
-Eric
I think you might be a little bit pessimistic about human nature. If I’m trying to get work done, how is it “gaming the system” to set my presence to DND? Workplace psychological research seems pretty conclusive that not putting any trust in people will lead to an environment where people can’t be trusted.
I would hate to work somewhere that I’d have to be worried about people gaming presence somehow.
Still, I definitely believe in automated presence as well. People often forget to set their presence manually. That’s why we’re working on presence integration with phone and calendar systems in Wildfire and Spark (http://www.igniterealtime.org). Still, I think that in most business settings, it should be up to the user to share what information they’d like.
Regards,
Matt
Hey Matt,
Thanks for taking a look, and for your post. Perhaps I put too fine a point on it, but “gaming” as I describe does not necessarily have to happen out of malice. I think it can be a subtle, incremental result of juggling the myriad demands of a busy, hectic day.
Also, and in practice this may be more likely, if users are inconsistent in their setting of presence, that can also be undermining. For example – what if a large number of users never bother to set themselves “away” when they are in fact away? Simply because they forgot, perhaps. That can become very frustrating for others and will also have the effect of users coming to disregard presence…
I agree that presence can be a useful feature, but IMO to be reliable it should be automated. Some of the consumer systems show both idle time and a user-settable presence. That would probably be an ideal arrangement.
Yep, totally agreed that a big portion of presence needs to be automated. BTW, you guys should put up some contact info somewhere on the site. I was going to drop you an email as well.
Eric
I agree with your comments about presence. In a text-message only world, it can be and is gamed. Where I believe it will matter more is when organizations skillfully link various forms of communication and collaboration (text, voice, maybe video) and then based on your presence a message can be routed to the most relevant place. It can still be gamed, but it will also have the potential to be more valuable.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your note, much appreciated. One of the things I’m eager to see evolve is more sophisticated forms of integration between modalities. Ultimately, it’s a question of the best tool (or modality, in this case) for the job. There are situations for which text messaging is preferrable. Video and voice, for example, just don’t scale cognitively. You can’t do a teleconference with dozens, let alone hundreds or thousands, of active concurrent participants. You can with text chat.
Anyway – watch for future posts on cognitive load, as well as some ruminations on video and voice.
- Eric
I have to agree with Eric. In my years in the IM space I have seen countless presentations describing the wonders of the varied uses and value of presence. The grand vision contrasts sharply with my experience.
One example springs to mind – a senior IT manager at my firm who takes pride in at least trying all the features of a given system. When he started using IM he would painstakingly update his presence throughout the day. After a couple weeks, I noticed he stopped and asked why. He said nobody seemed to notice or care if he set himself to ‘busy’ or ‘do not disturb’ – they messaged him anyhow. He’s never set presence since. This is a typical experience from new IM users I have seen.
I think there are a few rationales for people to ignore others’ presence settings:
- “well, xx is setting his presence as ‘busy’ for _everyone else_, my issue is actually important and he won’t mind being interrupted.”
- “IM doesn’t really interrupt (like a phone call or knock on the door) so if he really is in a meeting he can ignore me”
- “he’s been set as ‘busy’ now for x hours (x days) so he’s obviously leaving himself set that way, rather than actively updating it”
- or possibly the most frequent… “nobody actively/correctly updates their presence so why bother even checking”
Then there are the rationales for people to not setting their presence:
- “If I’m set as online people will think I have to respond immediately”
- “I want people to see me as online/available all the time, so they don’t think I’m slacking”
- and the most frequent… “nobody checks it anyhow so why bother setting it”
I think the reasons for not setting presence and the reasons for not checking presence are mutually reinforcing. It’s possible that in some limited scope (eg a particular company’s IM culture) that people do actually manually/actively set presence – though I have never seen it personally. Even if such a culture exists in isolation, I think its evident that it has not expanded to the large public networks. If anything, exposure to large public networks is likely to reduce the effects of isolated IM cultures and promote the ‘least common denominator’ presence culture – which is not setting and not checking.
I strongly agree that the value of presence if significantly overrated, it was often touted as the “holy grail” of EIM. Just look at your own use of IM, how many messages to a contact do you start with “are you there?”, or “do you have a sec?”
I personally don’t even think automating presence will be as valuable as many people make it out to be and here are a couple of examples why:
•One of the many reasons people like IM/Chat is that you can multi-task.
•There are significant cultural barriers to openly sharing presence in many organizations. For instance a young associate at a law firm would never want their IM presence to read that they had blocked their calendar for a workout, salon appointment…etc.
•If the presence of a sales person or trader in the financial markets changed every time they picked up a phone it would be worthless, let alone that a sales person wouldn’t want to appear “busy” to a client that will just pass them on their buddy list for their next broker.
This is not an issue of gaming the system, it’s just a reality. This is not to say that presence doesn’t have a place, in call centers and other similar applications it could be very beneficial, but it’s still not the holy grail.
In my opinion, persistence out trumps presence every time!
Great post Eric
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your post. This has definitely struck a cord with folks, one way or another. Your examples of certain jobs and the reality of their days is well taken. I think there’s an aweful lot of software out there that’s developed in isolation from actual users. But that’s for another time and another weblog.
You bring up the point of “persistence.” It’s a good point, and one perhaps that not everyone has the same perception of. Watch for a follow-up post on what it means, at least to me.
Thanks again!
Cheers,
Eric
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