This morning I got news that Peter Millard has
passed away. Although we never met in person, I chatted with him
numerous times online. About Jabber of course. I cannot even begin to
describe my feelings, but 
stpeter comes close.
My thoughts go out to his friends and family, especially Christina and
Zoe.
Recovering from my holiday on
Tenerife by trying to work away the backlog of news and
e-mail, I read a post by Phil Wilson on Presence-driven
interruptions. This was one of the drivers for building
Mimír. It uses presence to
decide to alert you of new news. The user can configure for which
presence statuses he wants to receive messages. By default, these are
online and chat. So if you send
dnd presence, the bot will be silent until you
become back online. When that happens, it may remind
you of the number of missed items with a link to your personal news
page where those items are kept.
It would be nice if more clients implemented so-called directed presence. This way, you could tell the bot only to not disturb.
Phil also talks about having your calendar help you set your presence more accurately, again. This is why Peter and I came up with User Activity. In my ideal world, several desktop (and possibly other) applications would work together to form my message and presence hub. This might involve a daemon that acts as the Jabber client and gets input from the other applications, for example via D-Bus. Your roster view would be just one of interaction points. I've talked about this before, and on the page linked above there are some nice comments about desktop integration. I seem to be pretty consistent in my comments.