Invisible Friends
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?
Related posts:
“Is the reality that this only still appeals to the geeks?”
No, I don’t think so. My brother, definitely a non-geek, has his whole high-school (it seems) in his friend-list on msn. His default setting is invisible. And there are plenty of other non-geek examples I can mention.
For myself, I very rarely use messaging anymore, except if someone asks me really. I prefer the “asyncronosity” of email and facebook, because it allows me to take my own sweet time to answer. And I also don’t check my mail more than a few times a day (using a quicksilver-trigger), because its too distracting. I’m still coming to grips about how I want to use twitter, more as an rss-reader than anything else.
But, as always, its up to everyone how they decide to communicate with the world. Invisible, busy, away doesn’t matter. Just do it for the right reasons.
A few months ago, Web Worker Daily has posted a comprehensive list of Do’s & Dont’s with IM and all that stuff.
See here : http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/01/14/how-to-annoy-people-using-instant-messaging/
I think it’s very clear that everyone acts differently. There are introverts and extroverts, and behaviour is somewhat connected to that. And there are different situations: work, play, love, which also determine behaviour. But there is no one-all for every single situation or person using IM.
Edit: you could probably plot a chart among all these uses and come up with interesting rules according to personality and situation.
http://wikikidi.jottit.com/
Ooops, apparently some bug into the WordPress system. here’s my original comment :
Speaking of IM, I’m putting together a comprehensive yet extensive list of FRENCH acronyms used in IM language on MSN, Yahoo!messenger, Skype and the likes.
Please feel free to add your own usual expressions here : http://wikikidi.jottit.com/
Thanks in advance,
_Marc