Problem is that more often than not to be able to receive presence updates, you need to be on the presence ("friends") list of the other party, you can't just r

Problem is that more often than not to be able to receive presence updates, you need to be on the presence ("friends") list of the other party, you can't just request the presence of any user in XMPP world. Even if you could, it take a few seconds, which is a very long time in the lifetime of a web request.