I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text. Once you were off AIM, you were off. SMS/iMessage/etc. are an open-ended conversation that spans hours or days with ambiguous expectations of responsiveness. In the past you were unequivocally sitting at your computer, looking to chat. Now you could be out working in the yard, running errands, trying to watch a movie, or generally doing something in real life that is interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends.
> I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text.
You had a keyboard for that, too. Nothing is quite so annoying as trying to have a conversation with someone when one party is on a keyboard and the other is on a phone.
I'm just... "not online" a lot of the time now. Stuff will get to me when it gets to me, and if I've gone a couple days without being really on the various messengers, that's fine. Expectation is that if you need something critical, call, otherwise I'll get back to you eventually.
It was a boon for me when I discovered voice recognition on my phone keyboard actually works well. I haven't been typing any messages since then. And my messages are also more clear since I'm not frustrated I'm wasting my time struggling with my large fingers on a little string doing something that could be done an order of magnitude faster with speech[0].
[0] Well, some of my friends are too lazy and actually leave me a voice message. I let them all know I prefer text messages and they can use the little microphone icon next to space for that. The only one who can communicate with me in this way is my partner, I actually like listening to their voice.
It's pure vanity I guess - but I feel really stupid talking to my phone to transcribe a text message. I also feel like it's a huge invasion of privacy even if I would be saying "off to the store."
I've decided voicemail is a dead and obsolete technology and haven't had it set up in over a decade, but I do agree that hearing the voice of a loved one is nice, especially one that is no longer with us
It's actually dependant on the carrier. In Canada most carriers will make you pay extra every month for visual voice mail, without that you don't get any kind of transcription. Some low cost carriers, like mine, don't even offer it.
What does a keyboard help? With swiping and aggressive prediction and completion my wpm on my phone is basically on par with a keyboard. Hell on the average day I probably write 2x as much by phone as I do with a physical keyboard.
Oh god no. My keyboard doesn't have autocorrect and therefore doesn't fuck up my messages where I'm correcting the damn phone's keyboard mistakes 25% of the time, especially when you're multilingual and have to slip in local language words into a largely English conversation (common situation here in India).
I've been using PC keyboards for 30+ years so it's just faster for me. I use Whatsapp (like most of my country) and prefer to have the desktop client open on my PC so I can type much faster and see everything on a larger screen.
Weird, I use three languages on my phone for typing messages and the autocorrect manages that quite well (to my surprise, at first).
Even mixing languages works quite well in my experience. I use "Gboard" which I think is the default keyboard app? simply with all three languages enabled, and I don't switch keyboard (using always the same disposition, the one of my native language which isn't the language I type most on my phone).
Unfortunately, Gboard doesn't seem to support multiple languages enabled at the same time if they use different scripts - you still have to switch languages.
I can kind of understand why, but I don't think it would be impossible to design a way for it to work.
Can you elaborate on this? I have three languages enabled on Android GBoard and it'll offer up completions and suggestions across all three languages even though I'm usually on English.
I'm talking about languages using different scripts/alphabet, e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc. The feature you are describing ("Multilingual typing") is not supported in that case.
So for example, you can enable it for English and Spanish, but not for English and Russian. In fact, it doesn't even seem to be supported for different languages that use Cyrillic.
Like, I absolutely empathize with GP. I’m typing this comment on an iPad, and in the previous sentence I hit the letter ‘m’ while reaching for the spacebar and didn’t realize until 3 characters later. I finished that sentence and realized it contained “thus” where I meant to write “this”. Then in that sentence I fucked up while typing “contained”. When I tried to do the swipe-down gesture to put stars around “that” I missed and hit the number 5.
Touch keyboards are a menace. Just because I can easily recover from errors doesn’t make them less annoying.
I just switched to an iPhone a few months ago, and it literally _always_ autocorrects “well” to “we’ll”. Why would it correct one correct word to another???
I never understood all those autocorrect errors until I tried sending a text on my wife's iPhone a few years ago. The last word in the text was a word it really wanted to correct, and it corrected it when I hit send! I didn't realize what was going on at first and sent the same wrong message 3 times in a row.
Well … sometimes you’re trying to blast through typing and can’t be bothered to stop to type an apostrophe (try other contractions without apostrophe and you’ll see what I mean). In that case the auto expansion is helpful. But I agree it’s as likely to get it wrong as not :) which is annoying.
I’m actually quite adept at my iPhone keyboard — one of many reasons I prefer the larger-sized phones. But I’m both actually faster (a solid 30 extra wpm) and feel less constrained when I’m typing on a full-size keyboard. There have been times I’ve been engaged in an active enough conversation by iMessage or by text that it motivates me to get out my Mac or my iPad for the benefit of the keyboard.
Jay Leno had a funny segment on the Late Show where he pitted the Guinness World Record holder for texting against a morse code operator to send a message. It's on YouTube. Morse code was faster:
I kind of love the idea that T9, which was created to improve texting speed, is slower than Morse which was more than 150 years old at that time.
Makes me wonder if there's a Morse code key with a USB or lightning cable. How annoying would it be trying to work in a Starbucks and the guy the next table over is tapping out a message via Morse? :)
It works nice 95% of the time, but the remaining 5%, you want to throw the damn thing at a wall in frustration for not reading your mind. I hate all forms of dictionary-based input and at this point I doubt it could ever get nearly as good as a real keyboard.
It seems like you should be able to make the call on what people should expect wrt your responsiveness.
I definitely know for most of my friends how they are responsive in what situation and I'm fine with their different rules. I expect them the same for me. Never told them but I have not had issues so far.
Just answer however you feel like doing this and people will have no choice to catch up anyway. It's probably fine to take hours or even wait the next day to answer a text. If someone asks you can tell them. If you feel pressure from message (notifications) to answer, that's probably something you can learn to manage and let go.
I know few people who actually expect others to be able to answer fast any time. I'm quite responsive myself usually but I fully expect most of my friends to answer in a few hours or even the next day, and if they answer fast, that's neat but not expected. Some friends take days to answer, I adapt. If they miss something, their loss at the end, but usually I think they see the message quite fast so that does not happen. If I propose something to a friend who usually answers the last minute and something else come up, I consider I can cancel with this last minute friend so I don't let their rules eat me neither.
Don't let the phone or the computer control you. That should be the reverse. If you are spending time with someone or watching a movie, just don't check out your phone. Put it away. It's going to be fine. If anything urgent happens they will call. Tell them if it's not clear for them. I do not answer non urgent stuff when I'm actually with other people in real life. They have priority. That allows me to enjoy and focus on them better. Messaging stays asynchronous and that's how it's designed.
Life is so enjoyable this way.
I have progressed to a point where I essentially have do not disturb on all day with my partner and mother allowed through as well as two apps for work and the rest receiving a DND response. I also have it set so repeated calls come though from my favorites in the case of an emergency.
I to do this. phone permanent DNB. Even during working hours, although then its in eye shot to the side of my monitor. So i can see stuff there, but can choose whether to answer or not.
Its been immense in combating the constant 24x7 messages i get from work. Its been pretty useful as well in just telling people drop your message to my teams, it won't wake me up and i'll get to it when i get a chance.
Only a few limited number of people on my favourites (which bypasses this)
I do the exact same thing. DnD is permanently on and I allow "favorite" contacts to come through as well as one or two apps.
My phone almost never vibrates or makes sound.
My social circle is quite small so I could see how this may not work for everyone.
I think I could get the same behavior without DnD but it'd require a lot of fiddling to make sure every app/contact has the right notification settings and frankly that's too much busywork.
I do the exact same thing. The only drawbacks are that I occasionally miss calls that I would have wanted to answer. Here's an example why this became necessary. I was recently looking to pre-qualify for a mortgage, now I'm getting 6-8 calls a day at various hours and even multiple unsolicited texts. It's amazing how awful using a phone has become and incredibly distracting.
I only use DND at night. Throughout the day, my strategy is to mute notifications from e everyone on Whatsapp except family. If I start a conversation with someone, I turn their notification on temporarily. I also have a whatsapp widget on my home screen where I can quickly glance for new messages.
Yes, I spend the whole day turning notifications on and off for people but I am very happy with my system.
I do this but specifically for managing call spam. I let messaging through though. Do you ever make mistakes like missing food delivery calls? I haven't found a great solution besides trying to remember to disable DND for those. Maybe I need to give them a dedicated voip number that always punches through, but I think even that could get call spam.
I highly recommend Google Voice or similar VOIP for all commercial services. That may help reduce spam to your mobile and Google Voice has filtering of spam built in (unsure of quality).
I do the same. iOS 15 introduced Focus, which extends the DND functionality to an arbitrary number of configurable “focus” profiles. Each profile may have its own schedule and exclusions by app and contact. It’s fantastic.
I am. However, there are times where I feel a slight guilt not responding right away and I still catch myself reaching for my phone thinking there has to be some notifications to check.
I am also. iPhone and Slack give me the tools to suppress the noise, but still catch the signal.
If I could ask for one thing, it’d be an easier way to toggle Silence Unknown Callers (which is in the anti-spam category, not quite what the article is focused on).
I’m old enough to have been a heavy AIM user back in the day. I don’t want to toggle on/off my “readiness for chat”, nor do I want to consider my recipient’s readiness for chat (aside from time of day sensitivity). I prefer today’s tools that put the onus on the recipient to configure their notifications suitably (hint: if in doubt, just turn the notifications off, and poll manually on an appropriate longish interval). If a human complains about your slowness to respond, that’s a social norms problem, not a problem with the tools.
interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends
You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
In my experience the issue isn't usually friends. It's people you have to stay in contact with like family, or maybe coworkers, and they don't understand what asynchronous communication is and have unrealistic expectations that now that you have an alway-on device, you will be ready to respond to it immediately. If you don't have that in your life, you are lucky.
It was the same with ICQ. You could sent messages when someone was offline or away but it didn't showed up on their screens until they've switch to an Online status.
It was much more useful and productive than today constant chatter.
There's definitely room to improve in the products (ie I think Slack's recent scheduled messages are a good improvement towards this), but personal discipline goes a long way here, especially when frequently the product/company goals (pumping engagement) are the inverse of your own.
You need to set your own boundaries, and not allow these devices/services to dictate so much of your attention (I say as I procrastinate on HN). Use app or OS features to mute notifications. Sign out. Wait before replying. Leave your phone behind.
99 times out of 100 you can definitely just wait before checking and replying.
I hate the opposite: I can't know when someone is free and ready to chat with me. I may send a message and wait 30 seconds or 3 hours until I can get a conversation going. Or get responses every 20 minutes instead of every 2 minutes.
Funny enough the prior end of this continuum was (free) local phone calls that you could leave open for hours to discuss with your neighbor friends while doing something else. Once you hang up you're off, and it's completely limited session in time and space.
I see some companies trying to replicate that with discord rooms, I don't know if it has much success for work organizations.
> SMS/iMessage/etc. are an open-ended conversation that spans hours or days with ambiguous expectations of responsiveness.
You can pretty easily set Apple ecosystem devices into various levels of Do Not Disturb, where for each level you decide which people and apps you will allow immediate notifications for and which you want to queue up until you mark yourself as available again.
Just like with AIM of yore, people who send you a message get an away notice if their message is queued.
Personally I also that aspect of text messages a huge plus - if someone calls me and I am super tired or busy or just do not want to engage in a full conversation I can reply to the texts at my leisure or not reply at all.
We have more options than ever - it comes down to the social aspects and expectations I think more than anything
Remember that back in the day your computer was not online 24/7/365. Away messages were really useful, because without them someone would have to literally sit at their chat window when you were online and wait for you to respond. If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all.
I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message. This completed the functionality we all needed: just make sure my message gets to the person eventually.
I don't think we want to bring back that experience. Facebook and WhatsApp and other messengers already give the ability to send a message when someone is offline, as well as letting you have a live interaction when online. All someone needs to do is set themselves as 'offline' and they can still get messages without having to respond. I think this is the right balance. The away message only makes sense if you want to be online and simultaneously tell people you aren't responding. Well, if you're not responding, why not just set yourself as offline?
However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
Historically it was useful to write a bot that told you when someone's AIM presence info changed because it actually told you they were sitting down in front of their desktop PC in the computer room and maybe interested in having a conversation. You could infer a lot of signal from this bit of info -- like, what room in the house are they in, what's going on in the cadence of their day, did they just finish dinner?
The context is just totally different today. Many people are constantly carrying a phone and pretty close to always interruptible. Whether "it's a good time to talk" I think is harder to determine than it used to be. Practices and cultures vary widely so I hate to generalize but, at least for the people I know, something has changed with how online people are and our social connections to one another.
>If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all.
This was a feature.
email already existed. phone calls already existed. AIM provided new information about a persons availability in that they were currently online and open to communications. If I didnt want to talk to people, I could not sign on to aim. Respecting peoples personal space was a default.
Now it is ambiguous. Does this person want to talk right now? They are online, but that means absolutely nothing now.
True - but is falling back to email really that big of a difference? It just means more work and one more username and protocol to remember. We could have better "offline" modes available on current messengers while still not just completely tossing the message.
maybe i am old, but the messenger service is the "one more username" to remember. i would drop messenger services before i drop email. messenger services tend to be linked to email accounts anyway - so im sure low friction solutions could be developed.
The point is to isolate sync communication from async to preserve the simulation of live conversation as an option online.
the issue is compounded because the person who sent the message may not be available when i see the message. Messenger was developed for people to talk at the same time. Honestly, it seems like product overreach for it to accommodate any async communication.
Async communication is a very important form of communication and should be managed appropriately and not shoe-horned into live chat UI's.
IMO async should always be threaded. If I would be changing my messaging behavior based on whether or not someone is online (which is sort of necessary to avoid confusion) - I would rather optimize that behavior change with two different (UI) systems than trying to use one chat box and one log for it all.
If someone is not in the room anymore, you cant talk to them. Full stop. Leaving the room is a signal that needs to be respected. It is one of the few powers individuals have in an actual conversation. Getting rid of simulated "rooms" online was a step backwards. Even if it happened during a simultaneous step forward for mailboxes.
Not arguing for or against email over chat - just pointing out that there's more to remember. Not to mention that you might share one form of communication with someone you just met (say a stranger you give your AIM handle) who then would not know your email at all.
The whole point of all chat apps is that you are not physically in the same room already so I'm not sure that we need to be perfectly replicating that. And even so - if you are in a room where you know the person will be returning - you can easily leave a hand written note if you really wanted to.
I am not sure where that quote is from (The point being to isolate sync and async) as I do not see it in the article unless I missed it. I think a lot of this is also indicative of a generational divide - I was an early user of AIM for example and I always remember it being relatively async. There was not a huge expectation that just because you were online and not away that you were always at the computer and constantly replying.
All of this just generally seems like dissatisfaction with the social issues that have developed around all of these technologies in modern times - people EXPECT way too much. Too much is normalized. This is stressing people out. And I think we need to start there to fix it instead of trying to band-aid the problem with tech fix.
If you give someone your email instead of your AIM then there isnt more to remember. You would email each other instead of using an always on messenger service. AIM was a place you logged in and logged out of, and all conversations were contained within those signals. It was a different experience which made it something worth remembering a new username for. If we take away the signalling that made it different than email, then why use a messenger service at all?
The current messenger systems seem designed to increase expectations, and then we wonder why people expect too much. they offer things like "online, away, busy, offline" but in reality no one cares. It all ends up just being part of your pile of notes that you will respond to when you can. So it might as well be email, which is built around that level of expectation.
I mean, I dont mind having to remember separate email and messenger accounts. I am just saying that if you are going to bring it up as a problem, then the solution is to drop messenger accounts, not email, because they barely provide anything new anymore over email except ambiguous expectations and stress
Also, I'm not sure why that point came through like a quote, it was just the point I was trying to make.
Have you tried to give someone your email in the past few years? Most people will just give you a blank stare for a few seconds before sort of accepting and then never contacting you. Email has almost become the equivalent of snail mail
Coincidentally I asked for some friends emails over the weekend to put together a viewing party for a show release next month. it was received well.
In general, I exchange phone number, email, or a social media account. Email is still the predominant item of exchange for all professional networking I am familiar with
Probably highly industry dependent but I would generally agree. Professional networking probably would be email and linkedin at the top. With so many people using gmail sharing your google account address also loops you into chat and all their other services which adds a whole nother layer.
yeah, linkedin for sure - although i usually dont exchange it directly as much as someone randomly inviting the other to connect after we talk to each other in person
> "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
I'd like to allow people to contact me when I'm on a holiday, but it should take them some effort. Like "You can contact me, but first solve this puzzle".
> I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message.
Why would you make a chat program into "email with extra steps" instead of just sending an email?
I had friends that I had their AIM name but I never knew their email address. Could I ask everyone on my friends list for their email, switch to email & email them, hope they check email at the same time they sign into AIM, and when we're both online ask them if they got my email? Sure... but that seemed like more effort, and writing a bot seemed fun :) And it's nice to have one interface with all the context.
When I was growing up AIM was the method to chat with my friends online. I don't think I knew any of their email addresses. If someone was offline, I would just have to wait until they came online. I could definitely see a bot like this being useful back then.
Pretty much all ISPs included at least one email, but it is certainly possible that some family members lacked a personal e-mail.
My first e-mail was aidenn@geocities.com, but I forgot the password and had no way to recover it since it was my only e-mail, so I added a zero to the end and re-registered. Say what you want about yahoo, but that e-mail address still works!
> However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
Great, now the random "Hot asian chicks" who message me (and 50 other people) with sexually explicit content will know I'm not at home and can burglarize me in addition to wasting my time with spam!
I find it inflexible to acknowledge that Slack has status messaging, but then reject it just because it isn't what you grew up with. Their main reason for rejecting it is that people can still send you messages. OK, fine - Just ignore them. Minimize Slack, or shut it off, and go about your day. Check back in later to catch up on things. After all, you don't answer your phone every time it rings, you don't reply to email every time, so why do people let themselves be driven by Slack messages?
The problem here is your team's messaging culture, not the tech.
> I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away.
The difference is that Slack has a mobile app so when you step away from your computer, you’re not really “away” like you used to be before smartphones were a thing.
Yes, you can disable notifications or try to ignore them, but that’s not the author’s point. I read it more as them longing for “a better time,” similar to an expression of nostalgia for the simplicity of one’s childhood.
Similar to the "you didn't answer the phone, so now I'm worried you're dead / know you're ignoring me" scenario we have today in which 100% reachability means if you don't answer the phone, there's a reason.
The surreal world of "hey kids, go play all day. Come back before dark!" is unfathomable. We literally leash children that are too small to be reached digitally.
Fascinating societal change in a fairly short amount of time.
But would you let your child be unattended and untrackable from dawn til dusk if you'd told them "have fun but stay in the neighborhood!"?
A well-publicized truancy lawsuit from maybe 5 years ago -- in which 2? children were remitted to foster care because an 8? year old and his brother were allowed to walk 2? blocks to a park unattended (I did a quick search for the suit, but there were so many results... the specific case ceased to matter) -- implies the answer is irrelevant, as American society wouldn't even let you if you wanted to.
I have to think there is also a good middle ground here - I also remember a LOT of kids getting pretty seriously injured and if you look at the numbers deaths were definitely higher. Most of that is attributed I believe to vehicle safety (which has obviously improved) but I am not sure we should remember being a complete latch key kid too romantically.
I do feel bad for the youth of today though - I feel like I really got the very last childhood that was not inundated with social media and increased anxiety while still being just young enough to understand all the latest tech.
Which brings us to the apparently-answered question of which is better: A life in which a child is perfectly safe but steeped in micro-risk-aversion, or one that can and will have negative consequences?
Like I said - easy middleground. If you live in a safe city let you kids go and do their thing on bikes or whatever. But make sure you provide them with a good helmet and that they actually want to use it.
I cannot recommend enough cultivating a reputation for being grumpy but fair. Try and make approaching you like a game of Dark Souls; rewarding if the player is prepared. People will respect your time and accept death as the penalty for failure.
This reminds me of Hamming's "You And Your Research" speech, specifically what he said about open vs closed doors:
"If you work with the door closed, you won't be interrupted - you get your work done. You work with your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on, so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on. They are not connected with reality. Those who have the door open may very well know what's important. I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door. I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular. Almost always the guys with the door closed were often very well able, very gifted but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
My general rule about communicating that I tell people about is that if you want/need a response call me, otherwise I have no guarantee I'll remember to reply or text you back.
This comes down to having distinct synchronous and asynchronous communication platforms. Back in the day you has email for async and aol/msn/icq for sync. On top of that they were only on your computer, and most people had desktops, you had to physically be at your computer to use them. The joy of sitting there chatting away with friends while doing homework or playing games was brilliant.
On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up.
Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text.
Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that.
(I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)
It was so much easier when there was one program where all your chats lived, and where this program was only on one device.
This article made me decide to shut up a lot of notifications. So I got to pick up the iPhone and both of the iPads, scroll through a lengthy list of every app on all three of those devices that's ever requested the power of sending a notification, find the apps people talk to me on, and turn off their ability to make a popup and a noise happen.
And then I get to do it again on the computer I'm typing this on. Except there it's a mishmash of individual program's settings and stuff in the "notifications" section of OSX's preferences. It looks like I was a lot more aggressive in making stuff not notify me on the the computer so there's not much to turn off.
I really miss the days when all my chatting happened via Adium. One program. On one device.
It was Trillian for me - one program and a ton of protocols. It was also a pain to setup though and often had to be updated as shit changed.
If you take the time to really customize your notifications you can make them pretty powerful - I have a huge system of color coded emails in both my personal and work email and only get notifications on my mobile device for the ones I find important. It takes up a good amount of time to initially setup all of these filters and whatnot but after the fact it is totally worth it. I spent about one full work day on each (work and personal) and occasionally tune it after that (only a few minutes). I wish I had done it sooner.
For those that really get annoyed by constant dings you can also do what my friend did - he turned on do not disturb (DnD) all the time. He then turned on the function where if someone calls back twice in a row they will blow past the DnD. And then added specific close people to the list of exceptions. At the time I thought this was a bit crazy but now I use a similar system at night when sleeping and sometimes when on vacation and it works surprisingly well.
They can also go too far in the other direction...
Cow-orker in other department always leaves their ${company internal IM client} status as "Away" because they are 'tired of those marketing ppl always bugging them'. This, of course, misleads everyone else in the company, not knowing if they are even working that day.
Sometimes they change it to "Away - Here, but working" which I guess deters only the ppl that look at the colored dot, not the text. This is exactly what the DND (different color) is for, but they cannot seem to comprehend that either, even after an explanation.
Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.
I did that - my IM client was on permanent 'away' status. I was tired of being 'green' and people would send multiple messages if I didn't respond instantly to their IMs.
Being permanently 'away' meant people could still contact me and I could respond when convenient without disrupting my work.
I very much subscribe to the convention that proximity should determine how much communication should interrupt what you are doing. Face to Face > Phone/video Call > IM > Email
How do you manage this expectation when working in an environment where part of the office is in the physical building and part is fully remote? When we were all in the office (pre-covid), anybody could walk to your desk to have a face to face conversations.
My manager warned us not to deprioritize IM/calls or it could be used to justify reducing remote privileges (since there isn't a good face to face walk-up equivalent when remote).
I personally hated when people walked up to my desk without messaging me first, and I view unsolicited video calls the same way.
During the peak of the original lockdowns I liked setting my "away" message to something comedic - the trend caught on with a few people I worked with.
This was inspired by an email signature I saw years ago from a coworker who is a super successful writer for a well known comedic TV show - it was a riff on the standard iOS email signature - instead hers said at the very end of every email:
I would like a physical version of the status message. An e-ink or other low res display with up to 160 char, connected to the internet, which I can place on my desk and can update from my phone to let my co-workers know where I am. Does something like this already exist?
There was an interesting startup from a few years back that would basically issue everybody in your company a dedicated android tablet on a stand that shipped with a customized collaboration software.
I'm not sure I'd like to use it myself, but it had some interesting UX ideas around always on video (but blurred out and audio muted) so you and your team were more "present".
I can't find it now, but a part of it was a better away message setup for the same reasons.
In the past, I had a small whiteboard on my door I could write my away messages on (lunch, meeting, vacation, etc) and people could leave short replies on it when they didn't want to send an email (call me, borrowed your charger. It worked great but only really works when you work in an office all day and can update it when you get back from wherever you went.
I never used away messages on AIM - I'd just sign offline (AIM for the longest time didn't support offline messages) what I miss is being away conceptually.
I remember the time before everyone had cell phones, when I might be out all day (as a late teen, and a little older - I didn't get a mobile phone until 20), and I'd have a couple bucks in quarters if I needed to phone home (or anyone) and had my important phone numbers memorized. I also had a pager for a while, so if someone really needed me, they could page me, and I could call them back when I was near a phone.
When I was driving, I was away, on my bike? away, out for a walk? away - while I could check in with people if needed, I wasn't constantly reachable.
Now there are half a dozen ways anyone can reach me, at any time, and for a variety of cultural reasons, if I'm offline for more than a couple hours - I have people who will be concerned.
I might be too Gen X for this but I'm a firm believer in just cultivating a messaging etiquette with the people I know and not outsourcing it to a status message. My boomer family knows they can always contact me via text and chat and my millenial/zoomer family knows I'm often away from my phone hours at a time. It seems pretty manageable, honestly.
100% this. Most people are cool with the rules I set down for messaging me. Basically "i will get back to you but not necessarily right away". However, some people seem to expect that you usually have your phone on you and they sent you a message you better respond ASAP no mater what. They can not comprehend that I have effectively turned my notification tones off (light buzz). I get too many messages to have that be useful anymore and I am not constantly fiddling with my phone...
Same here. I have all notifications turned off on my phone. Friends know that I only check Whatsup twice a week. Text or call and I'll usually see it within two hours. I don't really understand people who complain about these things. I guess we are wired differently. Whenever I check Whatsup I realise I didn't miss anything at all.
At work we have Slack and I made it clear that I might not be able to answer for hours. Use email and I'll decide if it's important and if so will answer within an hour or leave it for another day. I also insist that everything client/work related is in an email. If it's on Slack only then it doesn't exist.
It may just be a matter of volume. The older people in my life tend to text sparingly. For example, a quick text to see if I’ll be available for a call later or to know what time I’ll be showing up at their house. The younger ones text constantly with a lot of trivial items (news articles, memes, etc).
Personally, I like email for non-time-sensitive communication. If someone sends me a text with a news article or long video, I don’t want to drop everything to read/watch and respond. So there are times I actively ignore it as a way to try and change that expectation.
My personal thoughts on communication are:
- Phone Call == Extreme emergency or something extremely personal. Or preceded by a text to talk out something too complex or confusing to do via text.
- Text == Something quick and straight forward and needs a fairly quick response.
- Email == More complex information or non-time-sensitive. May take a day or two to respond.
Twitter and other "microblogging" sites used to be ways to share something akin to your "away" status. You'd post what you're busy doing now. "Reuven is eating lunch" or "Reuven is driving to Ojai."
I'd rather we taught people not to start a messaging/slack/teams/whatsapp/etc session with "hello". Don't say "hello" and then make people wait for however long it takes for you to type whatever it was you really wanted to say. This isn't a telephone. Stop trying to use async comms as if they were synchronous. It's rude and annoying.
I find this trends pretty well across generations - young people are rarely starting with "hello". I suspect people above a certain age just find doing it that way more polite
This is a really fantastic point, especially considering Slack lets you just get pulled in to something without accepting the invite or consenting to join. I prefer properly run chat channels over DMs (knowledge silos are bad), but the fact that Slack would let someone create a room, invite you to it, and start `@channel` blasting at any time is wild. At least we get the ability to snooze notifications based on time, I guess.
You can mute channels too. I have a ton of “ask” slack channels for the various things I’m considered a SME on that I simply mute. If I have a free minute I’ll drop in and share some stuff but I can’t be answering those things all the time.
mute sucks. It still puts the channel on the bottom and I'm the type of OCD idiot that gets annoyed by any unread messages. I really really really want /ignore. Because often I need to be in a channel but the powers that be add lots of spam bots to the channel in a misguided attempt at being "helpful". My morning struggle is opening Slack and clearing out dozens of bot messages across dozens of channels. I just want to banish these bots to /dev/null. Permanently. They provide zero value to me or, dare I say, anyone else. But the people that assume a daily flood of garbage information = more productivity have won the war.
Worth noting that Apple introduced Focus in the last version of iOS that added custom behaviours around this. If you message someone who is using a 'work' profile for example and have decided to ignore messages, the messaging user will be informed before they send the message that you have notifications disabled.
This information is also available to developers, so other chat apps could let messaging users know that a user is 'away' for example.
I quite like the idea of having an 'away' profile that I can set that is automatically mirrored across all my devices and all the third party apps I use honour the setting and make use of it, so anyone trying to contact me is told that I am away and won't reply.
You can have multiple focus modes, each with custom aways, which can be shared or not, each with custom notification behaviors by person (or group, like favorites) texting you and by app trying to notify, and shared across devices or not.
Prior to Focus, you could abuse the “dnd while driving” option to reply with a long custom text message.
But Focus is well thought out as a way to make all your apps behave.
As has been said but not discussed much, the real difference with AIM was showing an error to the potential sender when they start to compose a message. User is offline, user is away. The latter is similar to presence indicators today (you can still send for eventual receipt), but the former is absent today (no major platform denies the ability to send for reasons of an offline recipient; they store it for later).
Totally absent. Could it ever return? The closest thing I can think of is when you disable voicemail and turn off your phone (callers are given an error message to try later) but how do we get this error in front of people messaging, while attempting to compose?
IIRC that was the original intention of Twitter -- in the beginning the prompt was "What are you doing?" and you were supposed to update with something like "Out for a hike" and not so much hot takes on politics.
There’s a way to do those with email. It’s usually called an out of office or automatic reply. In exchange it will show up before you send the email. of course, people only use this when they are on leave, but that’s just email culture.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more recent friends. In that environment synchronous chat was fun and novel.
Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.
I think you can have away messages on MS Teams, you can have away status. I find it tedious to constantly update. Usually I just rely on the auto-status based on my calendar.
I dislike that teams auto-aways during Outlook-defined working hours. I want it to stay green, or red, or do-not-disturb at my leisure, regardless whether I'm focused on the browser window it is open in.
Install the teams desktop app. That uses the machines idle check to trigger the away status, so if you are active but not in teams, it'll stay green or red. Oh and also Google 'MouseJiggler'.
I remember a law firm I worked for where a few people (secretaries and paralogals) were using AIM for workplace IM. I'm not sure what else was commercially available the time (sometime between 1996 and 2006), but it was AIM was a handy thing, just as Skype/Zoom/Mattermost (and others my employer doesn't use yet) are today.
> Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps.
Teams for Business for sure has this function. I just checked Slack desktop - there too.
People definitely use them in different ways - much more reliance on the status icon which is set by calendar/activity. Lots of folks just set status message to "nohello.com"
It should be possible to specify priority when sending: extreme urgency / normal / nevermind. Urgent should always generate full notification with sound, blink and pop-up, low-priority should never generate any kind of notification.
Yes. There are times that I'm away from computers for a month or more, would be very helpful to be able to auto-reply on FB Messenger, iMessage etc to let people know I'm not ignoring them.
Interesting, I think I see WhatsApp, signal et al more like email than AIM. I've never felt the pressure to stay engaged in conversation or to answer right away, if at all.
How could they have a discussion on asynchronous vs synchronous text-based communication without mentioning Discord? Discord is the closest modern day equivalent to AIM.
