Matt Webb has built a tiny app called Glancing which is a different sort of Presence Detection app for a Creative Network. A group is intended to be less than a dozen people. A person may belong to several groups simultaneously by running separate instances of Glancing... It lets you "glance" at them in idle moments, and it gives all of you an indication of the activity of glancing going on... To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise. It uses AOL's Instant Messaging network (why not JabBer?). It jiggles a group state, which seems to me to limits its applicability to anything (other than jumping into an all-members Live Chat). A slightly different spin which seems more useful to me is jiggling each individual's state, as a measure of his willingness to be interrupted. Just idleness might be one way (except that you "look" idle when you're on the phone or talking to someone f2f). I suppose if one were using a Universal Inbox as a front end to all your activity, then you could associate different buckets with availability (if I'm reading A-list EMail then don't bother me, if I'm reading outside blogs go ahead).

Feb2004 update: slides from his ETech session. Incidentally, I think this model of coupling a system which is good for presence and small groups, that's AIM, with a request-response model could be extended quite well. The group is essentially embodied in the AIM buddy the server runs, and it's persistent. It has an existence even when individual members are going on and offline. It might be fun to build more stuff that shares this infrastructure - I'm thinking desktop equivalents to IRC bots. The same ideas as Infobot, but dealing more with problems like consensus generation software.

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