I wrote earlier about the need to appear differently to different people in the online world (to have different status messages and different availability for different groups of people). Having this all in mind I think there is a need to look at the notion of online presence as a faceted phenomenon. For this reason I present the notion of presence diamond to capture the faceted nature of presence and the need to appear differently to different groups of people.

The notion of presence diamond allows us to look at a person’s online presence as a diamond whereas different observers are introduced to different facets of the diamond. Facets differ among themselves in :

• Different types of presence data that is accessible by observers of a facet (like in cases where a user specifies a group of people who cannot see his location/or his status message regardless of the location/message);
• Different granularity of information accessible (like giving exact location to friends and only country or city information to strangers);
• Different data that is emitted to different observers (like having totally different status messages and different availability for different groups of contacts).

I believe this notion can help understand and study the faceted nature of presence and identity in general.

Acknowledgement
The figure and the notion of the Presence Diamond are strongly inspired by the notion of the diamond of digital identity, that Mike Roch,  from University of Reading, introduced at the Eduserv Digital Identity Workshop in London, January 08, 2009

Update

The presence diamond is published in a peer-reviewed publication. In can be cited as:

Stankovic, M., Passant, A. and Laublet, P., Directing Status Messages to their Audiences in Online Communities. Published in Pre-proceedings of Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms Workshop (COIN @ MELLOW) 7^th–11^th September, 2009, Torino, Italy