Presence- & Work- Line

General purpose IM clients do not address the needs of a globally distributed team as well as they could. After simple presence information the next important datum is availability (or simply timezone). Within availability having a good sense of the work day is important. This sketch shows the workday (the gray bar), and lunch (blue hatch), where "now" (red line) is for each of three locations



Now replace location with team member names and you have a much better presence indicator.