Paul Golding writes:
Presence and its associated buddy-list presentation is possibly the vital link to a mobile computing future, along with an ever-increasing reliance on the Internet for our daily living, which is inevitable. Information is the key currency of the modern era. The Web is evolving to provide information in ways previously unavailable and unimaginable. Broadband penetration increases and with it comes a more habitual reliance on the Internet.
The question is whether buddy-list managers (“buddy browsers?”) and Web browsers are convergent. This would certainly be a good idea as it would mean that we still have a single universal client with which to visit the information world and to interact with presentities (i.e. anything – human or automaton – that can convey its state to us and support interactive real-time communication). Imagine doing a search on contacts in your social-networking tool (take your pick) and having their presence information visible in the results and actionable (e.g. click to call, IM, push-to-talk etc.)
