Presence

These days I'm relying a lot on IM and other online communication and community services, while being involved in the design of some of these same services, so I stumbled across this with perfect timing:

Having ‘prescence’ in buddy lists means you are available for chat or queries to others. Do we now think that it is enough to be ‘present’ in reality - available, but not concentrating - awaiting a call to participate rather than participating by default? Would we be more productive or creative and less stressed if we opted out of one ‘buddy list’ of prescence - perhaps even sometimes the physical prescence.

From Blackbelt Jones — always interesting, always relevant — who also quotes Neal Stephenson quoting Donald Knuth:

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

Presence (in the standard MSN Messenger, etc., form) works well enough in a casual setting, but I'm not so sure if it always fits in a business context, especially with project teams becoming more distributed across different organizations. While a free informal flow of communication is usually a good thing, sometimes a more formal customer/supplier relationship has to be maintained, with the other party being a "black box" — yes, we work together, but we're not a team, you're not my buddy, send me an email, and I'll get back to you in 12 hours. Forcing you to communicate at certain times is sometimes just a form of micro-management.