Presence applications poised for take-off

Could the technology known as presence be considered a killer app? Some folks think so.

Our Special Focus this week looks at just that phenomenon. Most people are familiar with presence in their instant messaging use as a little icon that shows someone is online. But down the road, experts say, presence will separate itself from IM and evolve into a network service tapped by applications and corporate communication services, including telephony.

Our author (jfontana@nww.com) says presence is ultimately seen as a real-time communications, messaging and routing infrastructure that can support collaborative apps for user-to-user interaction. In addition, for communication between applications and users, such as notifying a user instantly when data becomes available, and for application-to-application integration, where presence infrastructure is used to advertise applications are up, presence can support what their functions are and what types of protocols they accept.

For more on this story see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/090604specialfocus.html