Via a trail through buddy space from John from Jon from Marc we come to know of BuddySpace, aka Enhanced Presence Management for Collaboration, Learning, and Gaming, a map-based framework for instant messaging:

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists: (1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard 'buddy lists'; (2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others; (3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform; (4) it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readily available.

It's also not a totally new idea, but draws some long forgotten prior art into a new frame. The geo-location aspects may remind some of GeoURL, but there was also a wireless employee tracking used at Xerox PARC back in the early 90's where ceiling wireless hubs were used to track PDA locations to a central office map. Also from the early 90's, Garry Beirne, Ron Reisenback and their startup Telepresence Systems Inc was selling a buddy-space groupware application (Team Workspace?) to show online availability with simple messaging (very similar to BuddySpace except there was no Jabber or even ICQ in 1992); even earlier, Bill Buxton's Telepresence Ontario labs used an office-locator system based on manual logins (like your office who's-in/who's-out pegboard) where Bill had his office door rigged to an old mouse to map his real availability to the virtual choices of free, interruptable, busy and out

There was a later MUD-like office-tracker app very similar to Buxton's (I forget the name of it) where each staff member had a virtual office where you could visit them in realtime (via app-bound chat-box, so you're stuck in yet another text editor) or leave files or messages.

so what went wrong?

Who knows why those older systems never caught on. Part of it may be proprietary protocols and closed source, but I found in my own testing that the biggest part of it was the lack of integration with the rest of my online life -- Garry's workspace app was yet another process to manage, most often, I just forgot to turn it on; BuddySpace integration with Jabber ties in Buxton's notion of seamlessness, of having new methods blend with and incorporate the old. Ditto, ironically, for Bill's own office staff tracker -- because it was a seperate app, it needed to be managed, and if you forget, the constant difference between the map and the reality just gets annoying.

Maybe this is also true for BuddySpace, but all these other apps were also monolithic, closed spaces that try to be all things instead of simple modules that only do what they do best. Mozilla and MSIE are also guilty of this, so it's obviously not a showstopper, but it still irks me that I have one set of edit-command rules for everything I do in other (Gnome-based) apps, another set of rules for my normal editing (although Gnome rules are similar to Emacs rules so the rift is not as severe) and then another completely different set of commands for Mozilla edit boxes where even common Emacs commands (eg Ctrl-N and Ctrl-F) are bound to browser functions.

And now, 10 years later, will BuddySpace get some traction? BuddySpace author Marc Eisenstadt makes some assertions that feel good:

The nice thing with BuddySpace is the 'feelgood' factor: like returning to the office late at night and seeing a few key lights on, knowing that certain people are in... more compelling with an office layout rather than a list...even better is your perceptual ability to spot the ABSENCE (or 'busy state', etc) of someone at a glance on a map you know, rather than having to scan a list...even a well-organised hierarchy is hard to scan rapidly.

.. but this is essentially what Garry Beirne said about his groupware telepresence app: Garry's exact words were something to the effect that you can see if someone is online so you can just pick up the old reliable telephone and call them. And it's true that I know people who treat IM like that (annoys me to no end, but they do it nonetheless) but do we really need a visual map for that?

I haven't seen the Fitz Law measures, and I expect different folks have different habits, but just imagining this thing before I use it, while I can maybe see the advantage within an office setting where I might need to physically locate someone to phone an extension (forwarding a phonecall to the phone nearest to them was a switchboard app we'd considered at Mitel in 1989 - but today, why not VoIP the call direct to their PDA and who cares if they're here or in Hawaii?) and for someone like me who has trouble remembering names but not faces, having the faces of a large team where I'm new to the group would be something I wished I'd had at OpenCola, but those cases are exceptions.

In the norm, I know the people on my list, I have only a handful of them who are in my daily contact, and on my desktop, real estate is at a premium -- do I have room for another browser-like window?

fitting software to the use-case

This is just idle armchair musing, so feel free to comment however disrespectfully, but it does seem to me that rather than a map tagged with faces, I'd want a face tagged with a map. Rather than be asking "what is the distribution of my friends throughout the building (or globe)" I think I'm far more likely to ask, "Where's Waldo now?"

What I think I'd want most often is the IM list as it is where I can optionally or selectively ask for the image of someone as the mnemonic to who they are (used mostly when the contact is new, fading with use as time goes on) and a hotbutton to ask "Where are they now?" or "Who do I know near Mr X?"

Only on very rare occasions would I want to see the whole picture, maybe if I was doing some analysis of room use or sussing out social hubs or other socio-ecological questions, or perhaps during a teleconference (ever notice how, in video/teleconference, a frequent greeting question is "Where are you?" whereas that question is almost never asked in IM or IRC?)

For just doing business, all I really care about is communications. I just need to know whether I can reach some specific person, and for that, the icon-annotated text list of online status with an optional avatar seems to do just fine ... and millions of IM users appear to agree with me.

Where a spacial orientation to IM might be useful is not in placing people in rooms, but in placing them in org-charts, and not where I have to see the chart, but where my software needs it. Consider any office situation: You have your local team that forms 80% of your daily communications network, but on occasion you need someone from a neighbouring team or the executive layer above -- there's no need to have all those names cluttering your buddy list, so you'd want to sweep out to temporarily show the list of the neighbouring departments, or even pop-up a chart map to let you scoot over to Legal and zoom in on the workgroup you need to contact to see if any of them are free for a quick question.

business geography

This conceptual mapping of a business, it just seems to me, is more in tune with the spacial organization people graft on their workspace than a map -- I worked onsite at Medialinx for years and still had to ask to find my way down to Accounts, and their constant office rearrangements and whole-floor relocations didn't help my quests much.

Business spaces are not arranged geographically, they are hierarchical and partitioned by the org chart, and any correspondence between the two is most often co-incidental. In my one and only visit to Nortel's golf-cart-taxi world in Mississauga, I couldn't even begin to imagine how a newcomer could find any arbitrary team member without a Perly's, but imagine if I, as a software developer, wanted to know if it was feasible to use some other clock-chip in the production, and rather than bother the chief engineer, I just zoom out to the company view, zoom in on the production labs, find the embedded assembly crew and casually ask someone if a change in one chip would drive them crazy ...

business IM presence management

I haven't toyed with BuddySpace yet, but it could be this app has most everything needed for such a business presence management application and that could really bring IM into the corporate repetoire. In BuddySpace, the map is said to be "optional" so the clutter issue is perhaps not an issue, and the maps can be office-layout charts which can't be that different from org charts.

If anything, outside of reframing their presentation towards this zoom-out/zoom-in business chart navigation (I'd tell them, except their feedback page isn't yet operational) the big issue to solve is to have central authorities set the group assignments -- if I understand Jabber correctly, BuddySpace will depend on individuals setting their own location, but in a business such as Proctor&Gamble where you have 20,000 employees in the roster, you can send memos until you're blue in the face and you're still not going to get complete compliance. What's needed is an administration role where localized groups can alter, reassign and correct org-chart associations, preferably directly from their existing org-chart software, or managed directly out of existing LDAP and/or Outlook directories.

Given that additional simplification, reducing the management of this data down into the management of other apps where the data is duplicated (every Outlook/LDAP record gives your workgroup assignments), we've acheived another stage in the seamlessness, and come a step closer to a feasible deployment of a real business-needs IM.

And that change is apparently already happening: Last May, CNet reported on Microsoft folding a new enterprise IM into the Office Suite but it remains to be seen if they've thought of the Outlook integration -- I'll be real surprised if they didn't.