Abstract
This is a master thesis (short type) written during the spring of 2008 at the University of Oslo under the guidance of the MOSCITO project.
The objective of the thesis is to explore presence mediation mechanisms and technologies to discover factors that are key for successful presence awareness mediation, as well as factors that lead to issues.
A thorough literature study has been conducted to explicate the key concepts: presence, awareness, and context; and thereafter different categories and typologies of these concepts commonly used within the domain of Computer Supported Cooperative Work are presented.
As instant messaging is a technology where presence awareness is an integral part, this has been used as a guide to investigate how the concepts in the literature study are implemented in working technologies. I therefore review two open standards, XMPP and SIMPLE, as well as generic specifications these two protocols have been based on to achieve interoperability.
In the end I discuss my findings, the most prominent ones being the importance of plausible deniability and the problem with protocol coupling, as well as giving a comparsion of XMPP and SIMPLE.