We just published two new social patterns in a new category, called Presence (under People), in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The two patterns are Availability and Updates.
The Design Pattern Library is a collection of guidelines for the design of online interactions that can aid decision-making and guide the work of web developers and designers.
I’ve been studying the concept of “Presence” (often meaning remote presence – telepresences – or digitally mediated partial presence) for about five years now, with an eye toward a possible unbook on the subject some day, and I was able to flesh out a handful of presence patterns for the social patterns project and Yahoo! Press book.
These two patterns emerged from that process and carry within them the work of many Yahoos. The Availability pattern is derived from the work of ex-Yahoo Matte Scheinker and the Messenger team, and the Updates pattern leans heavily on the work of Barry Crane and the Vitality platform team.
It’s not always easy pairing social pattern with useful code examples or resources but with Updates I’m excited that we’re able to offer crosslinks to three relevant Yahoo! APIs (Updates, Meme, and MyBlogLog) and an emerging open Atom extension (Activity Streams).
Likewise, for Availability we’ve got a code link to the Yahoo! Status API.
via Presence, the new social pattern category (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog).
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4 responses to “New Presence patterns in the Yahoo! Pattern Library”
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Hi Christian,
This is a great example of one of those many things we didn’t realize about the value of face-to-face interactions till we started collaborating remotely. The simple knowledge that someone is “in” or “out” of the office (and what mood they are in) can speak volumes.
Dave, I agree.
I think one of the big challenges of “presence” (beyond using as much bandwidth in the loose sense as possible) is matching the right mix of sensory channels for the right types of communication, but also clearly defining the contours of availability so as to use it wisely.
If I have five minutes of full attention available and you know it, you can craft a five minute idea for me. If you know you can have part of my attention over the next few hours you may choose to express yourself differently to flow into my consciousness at the right pace.