A couple of years ago, we designed the Notification Service Transfer Protocol (NSTP) as a general-purpose coordination mechanism for building synchronous groupware applications. We have been able to build a variety of interesting applications with NSTP, and the design seems to represent a good tradeoff in terms of simplicity, power, and reliability. We initially thought that a colleague awareness tool (colloquially, a "buddy list") was just another synchronous groupware application. However, as users requested more capabilities, we learned that awareness applications have a different underlying model of social interaction from our other, quasi-meeting, applications. Accordingly, we designed the Simple General Awareness Protocol (SGAP) to address the problems that arise in sophisticated awareness applications.