Twilio Client: Presence for Everyone!

September 21, 2011
Written by
John Sheehan
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

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Less than two months ago, Twilio introduced Twilio Client, a set of SDKs that enable developers to build VoIP into their web and mobile apps with a few lines of code. Today, we are launching a major update to Twilio Client with the Presence API. As its name suggests, Presence lets you add presence-awareness to your Twilio Client application. With Presence, your app gets notified when users and/or devices come online and go offline.

Traditionally, Presence functionality has been complex to implement, varied in formats, and required pushing large amounts of data to the client. But Twilio’s Presence API enables you to integrate presence information with a single method: to begin using it, existing Twilio Client applications only need to register one additional handler:

Twilio.Device.presence(function (presenceEvent) {
  console.log(presenceEvent.from + " available: " + presenceEvent.available;
});

Since rolling out this service internally we already have built a variety of apps at Twilio HQ including:
  • Call Routing
  • “Buddy List”-like availability lists
  • Creating alerts for specific users

Presence has also been added to OpenVBX, seamlessly enabling browser-to-browser calls based on who is online at any given point in time. If a user isn’t online, OpenVBX will fallback to to mobile numbers, ensuring that your calls always go through.

Twilio Client Presence has been enabled for all existing and new accounts. Learn more in our updated Client Quickstart or check out the full Twilio Client documentation.