Recently I’ve noticed how my friends and I spend more and more time on the internet. Even when we are just using some desktop applications, we are logged on some chat programs so that our friends can see that we are there – in the online world.

Twitter and the way how it attracted a lot of users to share their current activities and thoughts was at first a big surprise to me, but then I realized how important it was for people to create an image of themselves in the online world and present themselves to others.

In that sense it became clear how necessary it is to model all those pieces that make an image of somebody’s presence in the online world, so I have started a new project for modeling the Online Presence and enabling the interoperability between applications where Online Presence data is declared. Please see the project website for more details: http://www.milanstankovic.org/opo/.

I expect that the field will gain even more significance with mass adoption of mobile devices that will make us almost constantly present online. Then the precise definition of our presence and attitude towards contacts will be crucial.