You know me, I don't like to complain

There is an interesting thread on BlackBerry Forums (which is an amazing resource every BlackBerry user should be reading now and then) about a Presence application for the BlackBerry (and other platforms) called Talk-Now. There are a couple of big problems with this, which I pointed out in the thread.

Simply put, I have zero interest in maintaining yet another set of relationships with people.

First of all, the mobile space already has two very viable and already deployed and operational systems for handling presence and messaging. XMPP/Jabber and WV/IMPS.

So far, Jabber/XMPP isn’t heavily integrated into handsets very well. It is very much a separate application in user-land that doesn’t have the tight integration you really need with presence application. The implementations of Wireless Village/IMPS I see today are much better for such things. For example:

On many Sony Ericsson and Nokia handsets you can actually see the availability of a contact in the address book. So as you’re getting ready to call someone, you can see their presence right then and there. And you can opt to send them a message instead of calling them if they’re busy.

I would really like to see better implementations of XMPP on S60 and other handsets, however. I think that even having it integrated into the S60 Messaging application would be far preferable. But on the BlackBerry that disconnect still exists, and having an entirely different architecture and non-open system (which they say will be rolled into XMPP eventually) makes it even less attractive. XMPP is everywhere. And it can be everywhere. And the fact that it is federated makes it even easier to deal with, since you’re able to deploy however you want and allow communications between organizations with ease.

Why iotum trumpets the lack of messaging as a feature is beyond me.

The one thing I will give them credit for is that they say that they can set this availability and presence based on the metadata of the end user. Time of day, calendar, free/busy status, and other bits that are glued together. That is nice, really. But to not use XMPP or WV for sharing this information out is remarkably shortsighted for a product that otherwise wins out on features in spite of requiring an MS Windows architecture to be effective.

The problem is, how are they going to be any better or different from open standards once they mature on the handset? The user experience for these existing standards is already quite good, and I don’t see how they can expect to monetize their offering against the services that are actually pre-installed on handsets and supported by Operators themselves.