Presence in the wireless world..

one of the reasons why texting is more popular than calls, and Instant messaging applications like AIM-GIZMO is mainly due to the presence factor...People love the fact you can put up standard or custom "Im Busy" "call my cell phone" away messages..you can block people off your buddy lists as well.. but when it comes to cell phones that isnt possible..in our current world presence means you can turn it off, you can silence it, you can do call fwd based on the caller, etc but there isnt something that shows your presence in real time... text messaging is popular because people feel like when you call someone you could be interrupting something and a text is not as intruding... the folks at Jaiku have come with something really cool that will help you decide if its a good time to call.. the jaiku phone book displays in real time presence and location of your jaiku buddies...their app runs on the S60 platform built on Symbian OS, which is widely used in the new generation of Nokias ....other similar services are twitter and plazes ... all are pretty cool in their own way.. what limits jaiku is needing a phone that runs s60 and that your friends have to sign up as well..same for twitter and plazes.. Services like these are the next myspace.com where I can see if my buddies are on or not, can talk or not, and be able to customize my presence..
why would we want this? we were at the shakira concert last month, I knew two friends were there because they told me to but there were 4 more close friends there as well but neither they or I knew they were there.. but if we wouldve had a presence solution we would've..even simpler things like when my girlfriend calls because she is coming over but I dont have my phone, if I had my presence set to "Im home"it would solve those missed calls or even save calls/minutes/voice mail messages... speaking of voicemail...a year or 2 ago I thought about making presence powered voicemail..basically you have different greetings set up for different times, for different callers, much like instant message you put your away message when you are at home, at the office, etc. callers then get a customed greeting when they call..
its all about presence and I see apps like these becoming more and more powerful, useful and common here in the US hopefully soon and we can catch up with the UK where services like these are widely used now