BuddySpace

    Instant messaging has its own charms else than messaging itself! See for example our age old yahoo. Its coming in with soo many features, which no one would have thought of integrating with any chat client, just a few years back. Some of them which I prefer are Yahoo Search directly from an IM window, audibles, contact info on the fly, launchcast radio,  people search from yahoo directory, Stealth Settings for every user n group, infinitely long status message, games and IMVs, Avatars and what not. Now that they are integrating whole surfing experience and innovative technologies from security and service sectors, here comes another new messenger which rocks in its own way. Unfortunately, its first 2 runs on my machine weren't successful in terms of proxy connection settings and I didn't had enuf enthu left at the end of the fight to bang my head on this 5222 port thingy!
    Anyway,BuddySpace comes in with MAPS along with messaging; maps about global locations of other chatting party, about home or office plan of the place someone is chatting from, or approximate visualisations of the said space! etc. What Marc's team is trying to achieve is what they prefer to call "enhanced presence management."
Here is their philosophy explained! As they put it, one of the many objectives of the whole project sounds like this, "Indicators such as 'online', 'away', 'busy' and 'offline' are proving to be much less useful than more advanced status indicators such 'now working on work-package X', and we need to develop a richer presence vocabulary to reflect this. What should this vocabulary look like?" The way BuddySpace has come up, this so called vocabulary seems to be going to include concepts like, meaningful knowledge exchange, coherent workgroup practice, opportunistic interactions, presence awareness, etc.

    I hope to check out the s/w soon on my machine, time permitting and will see to it how it revolutionise the concept of instant messaging, as the development team says so!