Personalization and Presence

To continue the theme of context-aware services ...

In his post on Context-Awareness, Charlie Bess (EDS) has returned to Paul Miller's question - is this just advertising? Charlie has spend some time recently talking about attention management, and there is certainly some value in using context to target various forms of communication more accurately.

However there are many important forms of communication besides advertising. And there are other important forms of service provision, and many other ways in which services can be differentiated according to context.

Charlie himself has blogged about Personalization and Personal Experience. Neither of these are possible without the service providers having access to some elements of the customer's context.

And my favourite telecoms blogger, Martin Geddes, has just posted some great examples of context-awareness on the Telepocalypse blog. In Disappearing Telephony, he talks about the transient context (presence) of a conversation taking place within one's social network. And in They Told Me, he describes IVR systems that are capable of some interesting forms of personalization. Martin says that the IVR vendor TellMe aims to "optimise to meet user goals, not sub-tasks". I shall be very interested to see how this is done.