It's time to bring back the AIM away message
wired.com
wired.com
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.
Yes, I spend the whole day turning notifications on and off for people but I am very happy with my system.
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.
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.
I tweeted in jest about this and this is not even hyperbole. This literally happened while trying to swipe on my phone keyboard for "yesterday" - https://twitter.com/madmanweb/status/1513786589230493696
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.
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).
IPhone is unusable in this regard. Switching from one language to the other is just not cutting it. That's simply not how polyglot people communicate.
I can kind of understand why, but I don't think it would be impossible to design a way for it to work.
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.
I used to frequently type "habe" instead of "have" (since V and B are right next to each other), and autocorrect would change it to "haberdashery"
Not sure how that happens.
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.
Indonthisntonfuckingnmuchnandninreallynhatentryingntoncleannitnup. Exceptnitnisnalwaysn”n”ninsteadnofn”m”nfornsomenreason.
https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/cool-videos/jay-leno-tonig...
Which seems like an unfair comparison to todays phone keyboards. Still, I HIGHLY doubt that even todays phone keyboards come close.
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? :)
[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.
I see some companies trying to replicate that with discord rooms, I don't know if it has much success for work organizations.
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.
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.
You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
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
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.
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.
Why would you make a chat program into "email with extra steps" instead of just sending an email?
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!
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
In my experience, tech natives are on board with the idea of responding in your own time and insulating yourself from always-on communication.
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 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.
"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."
For those discussing DND elsewhere in this thread, the notion of being generally reachable at specific times exists.
I am using same rule and my slack is very quiet while colleagues are constantly complaining of distracting messages.
They also don't chitchat anymore knowing that unimportant inquiry will be left unresponded for a while, giving them anxiety
Call if its an emergency, and its probably not really am emergency for me if you don't have my number
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)
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.
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.
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.
In this case the "catastrophic result" is being forced to resort to email.
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
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.
We must have very different definitions of the word "catastrophic" ...
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:
"Sent from YOUR iPhone!"
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.
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 don't use any DND or away messaging. I answer when I choose to answer.
I don't really get the issue.
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.
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.
What I dislike about Slack is that it makes it way too easy to create new (group) Channel and then the signal-to-noise ratio drops off a cliff.
Maybe this is just a function of where I've worked and used Slack, but most of the chatting is happening in group Channels, not 1:1.
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.
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?
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.
Right now its more of a "Link In Bio" type side, but to make that less strict, and more of a tiny site.
> 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"
People should be contributing to structured, threaded conversations.