Would you like people to call you with a job offer? Thousands of people? One of the projects I proposed when I was at Adecco was a personal career availability broker, so you could signal your career presence.

Let's filter this so only certain kinds of employers, recruiters, or jobs find me. Maybe my family or my boss don't need to know I'm looking. And maybe I only want jobs that pay more than I make now or that will cover a health benefit. And maybe I'm not available for the same kind of job I have now, but I've always wanted to be a chef. So my career presence must include my goals, selection criteria, and at least some of what I have to offer.

The Architecture of Rich Presence

Simply signaling I'm online won't wash. Generic presence wastes my time and companies selling jobs I'll never even consider. Bad presence drives us to lie about ourselves to protect our time and privacy. Good presence understands and supports specific types of conversation. Each type of conversation has characteristic:

• signals
• triggers
• conversation flows
• privacy expectations
• measures of success.  

In the career context, workers need to signal their career availability, often with great discretion. Each worker has many career presence "rules," for want of a better term, to indicate their complex career interests. For example, "Actively seeking a job as a butcher but only in a kosher shop". 

It's not enough to share your availability: good presence indicates how others may act on this information. For example, "call me any time if you have a management job in life insurance; contact me through my LinkedIn form for insurance sales jobs; or call my agent if you think I'd be a good fit for your next movie). 

Some presence won't be shared unless people qualify. I may not want my career search seen by anyone at my current workplace. I may share my geopresence and travel plans with family, friends, and colleagues, but not with strangers or clients. You may be asked to fill out a questionnaire before my agent discloses more of my romantic availability.

MOS? ROI? Skype Moodies, Twitter and Plazes presence are small talk, social lubricants that help friends keep in touch and strangers start to learn the kinds of things we might say at a party or over lunch. While music presence should build my music cred with those who share my tastes.

Presence Flavors Serve Many Needs

We have many contexts for presence:

• Political. From "don't bother me" to "looking for a full time cause."
• Romantic. "Love Stinks" to "Do Me Now."
• Marital (not to be confused with Romantic).
• Musical. "I'm listening to..." and "I like to listen to..." 
• Clinical. "I'm fine, focusing on prevention" to "I'm flatlining, send a crashcart" 

We also have Associative Presence and Proximity Presence. I'm at Moscone Center. I'm a member of the Berkeley Communist Party. Jeremy Pepper: "Rocking out at BlogHer - the LLCoolJ (ladies love cool Jeremy)". The better to help you mingle and help relevant others to discover you.

Gendered Presence leads to Conversation Markets

You'll notice markets forming when both buyers and sellers signal their presence. In this light, eBay and Craigslist start to look like weak presence signals for the commerce context.

Like job seekers, employers have career contexts too. Contracts listed and awarded. Job listings to be placed. Jobs no longer available. Future job openings. Presence signals from both service providers (have capabilities, want compensation) and service consumers (have work to be done, offer compensation) are feed job boards and trigger career conversations.

Matching engines, like those used by some dating sites, find a mutual fit. While you might find a dinner with Oscar recipient Al Gore interesting, would Al Gore find you interesting? More interesting than his other choices? Trusted relationship brokers will trigger an introduction, perhaps even a conversation, when a mutual interest index is comes up.   

So, back to Skype.

Skype Prime better drive Skype to reassess presence. I may be "online" to my friends but "not available" to my paying clients. Or the other way around.  

The Skype clients also need to allow the mashup of availability presence (like Iotum's) with other types of presence. More importantly, Skype needs to open this architecture so each user can "subscribe" to many independent and trusted presence services and share this information through their Skype connections.

Let's leave the technical architecture of an open presence mesh network for another day.  

See also:

• Getting Presence Right. Getting back control of real-time communications.
• Skype and Trust. What obligations does your presence-host have?
• Location, location, location! Plazes comes to Skypeland. On the value of geopresence.
• Are you lying about your presence? Sure, when it takes too much effort or is the same for the whole world.
• What's Your Presence Strategy? Stuart Henshall's address to the Ecademy.
• Skype's three-stages to Presence Revenue. Adding faceted identity controls (who sees what and when and where) to SkypeWeb presence. Then licensing presence service to hosts and enterprises.