The guy has his finger on the pulse. We caught up with him recently in a phone interview from his home in New York. It was the day after he'd closed Instant Messaging '99 in Las Vegas, the first conference of its kind for IM cognoscenti. Instant messaging, of course, is the hottest Internet-based communications phenomenon. It's based on the fact that the Net knows when and where individual surfers are connected.
Users can send each other instant messages when they're online or enter into private chat sessions.
And it's the presence management part of today's technology that Pulver believes has most potential for revolutionizing the way we communicate. If it's during the day, connect to this number, if I'm on the Net using a dial-up connection, put it through as an IP voice call, at night put it through to this number. And so on. Leaving a message is very nice if you don't want to talk to a person. But in my vision of where instant messanging goes, you end up talking to a person more than to machines.