Presence and IntComm WG

[Peter Saint-Andre <>]

Neal McBurnett wrote:
> On the call today we discussed the question of how a user could assert
> presence selectively.  I.e. so that some other users could see it but not
> all others.  Here is my attempt to write down the question so someone more
> knowlegable [like Peter, hint hint] could help us out.  Please chime
> in, folks, if I leave important aspects of the question out....
> 
> An example bit of context was a user who planned to be out of town for
> a week, with their own normal client hardware turned off or
> disconnected, but wanted another computer somewhere to assert presence
> for them.  Another was finding ways for the infrastructure to update
> rich presence (e.g. location, based on wireless connectivity) and
> again how to do that in a selective way.  I picture that as implying
> some sort of user agent within the infrastructure (a plug-in for a
> server?) rather than being a feature in end-user chat client software.
> 
> A quick google search brought up "JEP-0126: Invisibility" (a "best
> practice")
> 
>  http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0126.html

We are probably going to supersede that with this:

http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0186.html

See the latter document for the reasoning.

Also in XMPP you can send "directed presence" (different presence to
different entities in you contact list) but few clients support that
because it gets confusing for the average user.

See also:

http://www.xmpp.org/specs/rfc3921.html#privacy

That also seems to be too complicated for the main use case (block one
user from communicating with me) so we are going to pull it out of
rfc3921bis and replace it with something simpler (but keep it around in
JEP-0016 whence it came in the first place). Nothing like implementation
experience to show what's broken!

> It seems to provide a way to do this for simple presence.
> 
> For rich presence, JEP-0163: Personal Eventing via Pubsub
> discusses a lot of this.
> 
>   http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0163.html

Yes, that's the go-forward technology for extended presence
(geolocation, mood, activity, tune, and the like). We're working to wrap
that up real soon now because a lot of developers are excited about the
possibilities.

> So, Peter, is this the right place to be looking?  Any other sage
> advice on this general topic?

I think you're on the right track! :-)

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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