After writing about noise of web 2.0, I began to think more about the amount of noise in my everayday web experience. In comments of that post, Cecil pointed me to Nat Torkington and Linda Stone and their concept of continuous partial attention. The stuff is from 2005, but the CPA is even more real today. And then I realised something…Why is my IM list empty?

After talking to couple of my friends, I started to recognize a trend. More and more people were starting to take advantage of “Appear as invisible”-setting. On of the major reasons was that “when I’m online, I don’t want to be constantly harassed by people sending me IM.”, some went so far as telling “I don’t want to send IMs, if people want to talk to me, they can call me”. These findings seem to offer an explanation to why the only people visible in my IM client were those who didn’t live nearby – people who didn’t have many real-life connections to their friends.

I confess, my default setting on Live Messenger and others was Away until couple of weeks ago. Maybe I didn’t want other people to think how much time I spend online. Maybe I didn’t want other people to send me messages. I don’t know. It took me a while to realize all this, but now my default is Online/Available again. Because, when you start to think about it, what’s the use of using IM if you’re using it to show other people that you’re busy? What’s the use to be invisible? Ironically one new feature in Live Messenger seems to have accelerated this behavior: “Offline messages”. A standard feature in all other messaging protocols, this feature arrived just recently to Live Messenger. Now you don’t have to worry about people being invisible or offline as the message gets still sent. A feature which was supposed to enable us to connect better with our friends in fact enables people to hide themselves and making IM seem like… e-mail. No availability information and no knowledge has recipient received your message. With this realization in mind I started to look at how sites like Facebook operate messaging. What Facebook et al do, is that they maintain a image of sorts of our social network until we login again …just like e-mail. You receive messages when you want to. Of course, the problem with this approach is that people create a habit to check their e-mail or login to Facebook every 5 mins. A problem instant messaging was invented to solve in the first place. Are we looking for refuge from cell phones and IM? Don’t people want to be online? This is actually a very important question. The whole premise of web 2.0 is ubiquitous social online presence. Is the reality that this only still appeals to the geeks?