Clay Shirky manages to salvage more than a good laugh from Peter St Andre and Joe Hildebrand's April Fools joke.

Clay Shirky

[from Many-to-Many: POKE in the Eye With A Sharp Stick]

So I have become bored bored bored with the April Fool’s stuff by and large, but I was struck by how much conceptual similarity the joke Jabber spec, Presence Obtained via Kinesthetic Excitation (POKE), bears to Matt Webb’s Glancing. I’ve been using Apple’s iChat as my IM client for a while now, and am addicted to the gentle ‘whuff’ sound as users enter and leave presence-space, so while POKE is meant to be ridiculous, it’s about 80% of the way to something real, something that both Webb and iChat are getting at — relying on the limbic system for presence awareness.

I go with that. I really like the subtle cues that most IM systems offer to indicate that buddys of various flavors are coming and going. That sense of social co-presence is a great context enrichment device, especially when this operates at a nearly unconscious level, like people moving around in a physically shared loft space.

One of the interesting 'etiquette' issues is how to propose a conversation to someone, and an obvious opening 'stroke' is the virtual analog of the physical observation of someone coming into your shared space: 'good morning, how are you?" This opens the possibility of interaction without the pressure to do so. But the cue of 'entering' social shared space is necessary, otherwise any approach can be perceived as an intrusion, as opposed to a welcome.