So many of my Gchat conversations have started because of the online status. I've hit up friends that I haven't talked to in over a year and had really great, synchronous, conversations because of it.
People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with people you didn't log into your IM client, if you wanted to chat with someone specifically there was a first class UI element for setting your status so you could tell others to leave you alone. Email and SMS were black holes where you only knew if your message was received via a response.
Now everyone is always online and it's never unacceptable to call, text, or IM someone. Read receipts are standard so you know if someone got your message. If someone's phone rings while you're eating, you're lucky if they apologize before answering, and you've won the lottery if they excuse themselves from the table.
It seems like we're all just sitting around waiting for an interruption to distract us from the life in front of us.
Idk... you damn kids need to get off my lawn.
I don't answer the phone when I eat or after 10pm. Same thing with text messages/emails. "Do not disturb" mode is there for a reason.
Eh, but you don't have to answer. I think the paradigm has shifted from a TCP-like approach where you're expected to respond in real time to a UDP-like approach where people fire off best-effort attempts to reach you and don't mind if they don't hear anything back.
At least, that's how it is among my peers. Reach out whenever, just don't expect a response.
I agree 100%, one of the only reasons why I prefer using Gchat over Hangouts and now I don't know what. Just because my Gmail is open 24x7 doesn't mean I am available to chat all the time to everyone.
Maybe I am wrong but I think this comes for people like you and me for whom desktop/PC is the primary utility over smartphone.