Presence and IntComm WG

[Ben Teitelbaum <>]

Neal McBurnett 
<>
 writes:

> This seems relevant to our interests.
>
> I heard about Galago in a recent Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter:
>  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue8
>
>  Galago is a "presence framework" designed to allow easy data access
>  about people and their availablity to applications. This includes
>  such concepts as when writing an email, you can see if that person is
>  online or not, much like GMail does. You can find out more about
>  Galago at its website: [WWW] http://www.galago-project.org/about.php
>

Digging a bit deeper over at the Galago site [1], I am starting to
think that the Ubuntu summary is wrong.  It appears that Galago is a
desktop-neutral message bus, through which "applications can generate
passive popups ... to notify the user in an asynchronous manner of
events."  In other words, it's biff on steroids.  That's not to say
that it couldn't be extended to provide presence in the networked
sense in which we discuss it, but I see no evidence that our kind of
presence is currently in scope for the project.

It is, however, my action item to contact the Galago developers; so, I
will confirm whether these impressions are correct.

-- ben

1 http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/index.html

-- 
Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/