Presence

The big development I'm waiting for is presence, based around that ubiquitous device - the mobile phone. Being able to see a person's availability, with context sensitivity will be a huge development. Availability will depend on who is making the contact and will cross reference to a calendar to check availability. It will also reflect different contact media - voice, SMS, IM and so on. Some of this is here now - Iotum has done some great work in this area. Skype offers presence but it's invariably out of date. Jaiku and Twitter provide a degree of presence. But what's missing is presence, based on the one device almost everyone has, the mobile phone. Presence must be seamless but allow for human intervention to respect privacy. The building blocks are there - it just needs someone to do it.