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July 28, 2004

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Day 2 of the CAC.
We spent a good chunk of this morning talking about "presence" in instant messages.

Presence is causing problems for people. When you sign in to an IM session, you're "available" and people feel free to send you messages. If you're sitting in front of your computer doing a whole lotta nuthin', then the message may be a welcome intrusion on your otherwise-uneventful consumption of fark.com.

On the other hand, you might be "available" in the IM sense, but busily authoring a marketing document, editing a PowerPoint deck, crunching numbers, and so on - basically, getting work done. In this case, the new IM is not welcome; it's like a ringing phone that demands to be answered. If your status is set to "available" but you don't respond, the person initiating the IM gets (understandably) miffed, because they think you're ignoring them.

(And they're right.)

There are all kinds of "solutions" to this problem today, but they push 100% of the work on to the IM user to update their status. My home IM client, iChat, makes it easy to create custom messages that tell others what I'm up to. As such, I have a laundry list of status messages ("On the phone," "Writing code", "Catching up on e-mail", "In the shower") that I actively manage from a persistent menu at the top of my screen. A number of my friends have taken to doing this as well - even to the point of aping or making fun of one another in their status messages. Richard, for instance, set his message to "Busy, busy, busy"; shortly thereafter, Mary set hers to "is busy like Richard."

As well as this works for Users In The Know, being In The Know is atypical, and thus an automated solution is a much more attractive option for people who want to just use their computers. Today's IM clients do this to some degree with their auto-idling (e.g., if you're away for 5 or 10 minutes, your status is set to "idle", telling people that you haven't touched the keyboard or mouse). While "idle" conveys a lot of useful information, it's also super-brittle: if you touch or jostle the mouse for any reason, you go back to green (available) and the 10-minute clock starts all over again.

I chose to blog this because I think the problem is really, really interesting from both a technology and a social perspective. We've never really dealt with this before in a new technology.

Phones, for instance, are intrusive like IM. But phones allow the called party to choose whether or not to answer, without any ill effects. Indeed, Caller ID has put more power in the hands of the called party, and people commonly screen calls. (In an interesting arms-and-armor race, this has led callers to leave voicemail messages that openly ask if they've been screened!). For now, it's acceptable to let your callers shunt into a voicemail system, and you can call them whenever you like.

E-mail is also intrusive, but you can choose when (or whether!) to answer. So it's not in the same league.

IM, on the other hand, demands an immediate answer because it conveys the pesky presence data, "I am physically in front of, and am using, the computer." This reduces the "Oh, sorry I didn't get your call ... I was out" defense that you can use with missed phone calls. Instead, the party IM'ing you has the impression that your willingness to answer them has more to do with how important they are to you than with any other factor.

We humans are social creatures, and we are nothing if not attenuated to our place in the social hierarchy.

It will be interesting to see how this "problem" gets "solved."
(Can it be?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 28, 2004 9:41 AM. Posted to MSFT.

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