Rafe Needleman breezes into a prosaic article on "The Future of Presence" that really doesn't even capture the present of presence:

... the concept of presence that's inherent to IM can also exist in other forms of communication. It isn't in too many places yet, but hopefully it soon will be.

Huh? While Needleman goes on to mention a few products (like Convoq ASAP, Microsoft Live Copmmunications Server, and SoloMio) he omits many of the coolest examples around:

• Geolocation presence -- like the Dodgeball and Plazes solutions, which take different paths to allow users to let others know where they are on the planet, in the 'hood.
• Project teams -- like Ubergroups, that allows team members to keep in touch with slow-time media (like blogs), as well as through real-time IM and chat: presence enabled.
• Internet Telephony -- Skype is a great example of presence-based internet telephony.
• Shared Documents -- tools like InstaColl (not reviewed here yet), Open Text's LiveLink Touchpoint and Microsoft OneNote, which provide a shared space for presence-enable collaboration within documents and/or document repositories.

This is no means an exhaustive list, but my point is this: this has been an area of explosive innovation in the past few years, and Rafe just leaves out too much great stuff. He doesn't even hint at the Microsoft Instambul client, announced at VON last week, which is a strong start for the full-on integration of presence into telephony:

[from the Microsoft press release]

As the preferred client for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, "Istanbul" will enhance the business user experience by:

Enhancing presence and real-time collaboration. With "Istanbul," presence becomes richer as additional availability data, including out-of-office information, is included. In addition, users are able to control their communications based on their presence.

Improving usability. "Istanbul" will help business users take advantage of advanced communications capabilities more easily by consolidating applications into a single interface including instant messaging, conferencing and traditional telephony.

The future of presence is that it will become omnipresent, and there are dozens of applications and services that have taken giant steps to get us there.

[Pointer to Needleman's piece from Carl Tyler, who says "Sadly the author hasn't really done much research for their article The future of presence or interpreted it wrong."]