nice post Ewan. and can i say, nice to see you renew your focus on blogging - you're a good writer. I agree with you on the linear nature of phones. Phones have begun to really annoy me since I finally understood identity management a bit better as I wrote about a while back:
http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker/archive/2006/10/05/My-deskphone-is-stupid.aspx
Ewan Dalton over at the Electric Wand has an excellent take on Unified Communications. You really should
Cool idea, Ewan - the concept of a filter that identifies "Hot Contacts" and prioritizes them so that if you're in a real busy state, your filter could decide up front who gets your time,and when.
In fact, why not have the flter decide to turn the call into a return IM, where necessary, and instead of being dropped into voicemail, the caller receives an IM while your phone is ringing.. giving them the option of converting to IM, because you're not in a state at that moment where you can spare "voice time", but you could spare "keyboard time" .. ??
Just a thought.
Bill Burke
Thanks Bill: I've circulated your comment and the ideas on this post to some of my buddies in the Unified Communications product groups... let's see if anything comes of it :)
I've been a long-time fan of instant messaging and pervasive "presence", especially the cultural changes
