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IETF Working Group to Define Presence Information
By Jay Carlson
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an international
community of stakeholders in the design and operation of the Internet.
Participation in the IETF is open to anyone; organizational membership
is not required. Work is divided into a number of functional areas, each
of which organizes Working Groups on specific topics. One such Working
Group is working toward defining protocols and data formats necessary
to build an Internet-scale end-user presence awareness, notification,
and instant messaging system. Critical issues being address by the group
include scalability, privacy, authentication, and user address namespace.
Instant messaging differs from e-mail primarily in that its primary
focus is immediate delivery to the end-user. Presence information was
readily accessible on Internet-connected systems years ago—when
a user had an open session with a well-known multiuser system, friends
and colleagues could easily tell from where the user was connected and
whether the user was using his or her computer. Since that time, computing
infrastructure has become increasingly distributed and a given user may
be consistently available but has no standard way to make this information
known to his or her peers.
For more information, please contact Jay
Carlson using the employee directory.
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