Managing contact status updates in a presence management system

Abstract

Managing online presence information for contacts involves propagating contact status updates from a contact to an interested identity. A contact list may include hundreds to thousands of contacts for an identity. When one of those contacts changes presence status (e.g., from available to do-not-disturb), the change is propagated from a device of the contact, to a server, to one or more devices of the identity maintaining the contact list. Although that single change or status update consumes a small amount of resources, status updates for a larger number of contacts occurring at various times consumes a more substantial amount of resources, including bandwidth and power. Although power consumption may not be a factor for a desktop computer, power consumption for large scale and/or frequent status updates on devices with more limited power sources (e.g., mobile phones, personal data assistants, etc.) may be a significant factor.