15 ms·

We don't show typing status

250 points by commondream 4y ago

aftbit 4y ago
I wish Matrix/Element had optional read receipts and typing status. In some circumstances, I prefer to avoid the artificial time pressure added by the knowledge that others can see when you have read their messages, as well as the sense of commitment from starting to type a message.
- feanaro 4y ago
  Typing status is already optional, private read receipts are just about to land in Synapse I think.
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2285 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/228... is the thing to track.
nickdothutton 4y ago
I’ve never heard of Cardinal but I liked the fact you could actually see what people were typing, character by character, in ytalk. Sped up a lot of conversations.
- dilap 4y ago
  that's interesting. i've never used chat that does this, but i have seen a lot of claims it was a misfeature in google wave back in the day. but still, i could see it being ok, more like verbal conversation. i defnly agree w/ the linked article that the middle ground of "<soandso> is typing" is a misfeature. the only possible response to that information is to sit there waiting, which is annoying/pointless. (but nothing beats verbal comms, still. downside of course is that it is "extremely synchronous" and does not archive well.)
- geoffjentry 4y ago
  I found it often the opposite with ytalk. Yes, some people would just plow through it and make the best of things. And one could already be thinking about a response in real time. But other people would find the need to correct every typo. And it was painful as crap watching someone with a 5 WPM typing speed and an affinity for typos to get through what they were trying to say. And eventually you move past thinking about a response in real time to screaming "JUST STOP TYPING ALREADY!!!!"
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    I just start typing my response, or finish the thought for them, maybe with a question mark to give them room to correct me if I mis-predicted. I've spent many hours using ntalk and I love it. It is true though that it lowers the fun when the other person is a slow typist.
- Aloha 4y ago
  I came here to say this, I would love a service like this.
KerrAvon 4y ago
Non-disableable typing indicators is one of the few things I very much dislike about Slack. I don't want people to see whether I'm typing, and this means I have to use an external editor. (The big other thing is @here/@channel notifications by default being on. No fucking thanks -- I turn that shit off on almost every channel.)
- sys_64738 4y ago
  This ^ - being forced to use an external editor to type you response then copy/paste defeats the purpose. Plus Slack is such a POS anyway. I also hate the distraction of the crap notifications. Humans are not interrupt-driven creatures.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    so long as we're dogpiling Slack, let me add in my complaint: You can't mute Slackbot, and Slackbot sends a LOT of dumb and pointless messages about channel management. At work they're constantly adding thousands of people to "watch party" or other random channels, then archiving those channels later on, and I keep getting notifications from Slackbot about them. I was trying to keep Slack notifications unmuted in case my manager needs something from me, but I was just getting too much useless crap from Slackbot. Finally I had to mute it completely and tell him to call my cell if anything comes up
    - gkop 4y ago
      Huh, I enjoy a muted slackbot. Are you sure it’s not just that you can’t mute slackbot when a personal at-mention is “injected” in slackbot’s message? Because yea that’s annoying af. That comes from slack app developers not understanding the platform though. At-mentions should only be used with intention, and obviously an at-mention in a DM is completely unnecessary.
  - wruza 4y ago
    What’s wrong with someone seeing that you are typing? Seriously.
samtimalsina 4y ago
Never heard of Cardinal either, and I like that they don't show typing status. If I see someone is typing in a Slack channel, or typing to me privately, it takes all my focus away until it is complete. Interesting though that they don't show their pricing on the website. Why's that?
- barkingcat 4y ago
  that means a person can DOS you by typing and erasing text but never sending you a message?
  - das_keyboard 4y ago
    Just typing something and then not sending a message puts me out of order for about 5 minutes while I'm waiting if there is a message coming. And then another 10 minutes while I'm speculating what he could have wanted from me.
  - samtimalsina 4y ago
    People do that?
    - layer8 4y ago
      Happens often enough that people start responding but then realize they don’t actually have anything useful to say right now (“never mind”).
    - andkenneth 4y ago
      There's that one guy who built a bot that automatically sends the typing signal back whenever it detects someone typing. Very funny prank.
- commondream 4y ago
  Hey! We're super early on in our journey and are figuring out pricing. If you reach out through the site we'll get you set up with an account and work with you to figure out what's reasonable for your team price-wise. We're focused on making sure pricing isn't per-user because it's annoying to pay an additional bit of rent for each new person on the team regardless of how much they use an app.
joshstrange 4y ago
On the flip side I greatly prefer the indicator. It lets me know if I should wait for a response or move on to other things. When I message someone I wait a few seconds to see if they start typing and if they do I just wait and if not I can start focusing on something different.
- layer8 4y ago
  Often enough people start typing but then decide to not respond after all (or not right away), so you end up waiting for nothing.
  - cgriswald 4y ago
    Or they're fat-fingered like me and accidentally click a character while trying to close the message app.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Or a “spit it out” response
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- Groxx 4y ago
  And if the typing goes on for more than 5 minutes, you know you're going to need to get a drink and sit down for a while. yeah - typing indicators are handy. Personally I want something that does opt-in. I'll happily share my indicators with people I communicate with regularly, it can be extremely useful to know if a message that's time-sensitive but doesn't require a response was seen ("grab milk too"). I sure as heck don't want to for most public-ish comms though. And I am entirely fine telling people that "I enable it for ~5 people and you are not one of them".
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Whats wrong with a simple acknowledgement message like, "ok give me a min" I still do this even with today's typing statuses and I think people recognize the importance of a simple ack
walrus01 4y ago
i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like. In addition to the problems with having an app that sends an indicator to the other party that somebody is actively typing. I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a contact. Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is opaque to me and I'm totally fine with that. One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead. In things like facebook messenger I bet that 99% of users never dig into the settings to turn OFF the "show your activity status to other people" option. For something like a work place communication tools such as Slack I can understand the purpose of setting yourself active or idle manually to indicate whether you're available for messages, or in a different time zone, or whatever. That's a different use case.
- sroussey 4y ago
  I never had a phone number for anyone I chatted with on IRC. Same with ICQ.
- hbn 4y ago
  I don't even like read receipts for casual communication apps. I feel like they only cause stress. I don't want people to know if I'm read something because I may have read it but be too busy to respond and need to come back to it later, but I don't want the person thinking I'm ignoring them. And on the other side of things, I don't want to stress myself out repeatedly checking if someone read my message.
- easton 4y ago
  It’s interesting, because I remember Steve or somebody saying this was a selling point of iMessage. “No busy indicator, no offline state, just send your message and they’ll get it on all of their devices”. Then at the last WWDC they go up there and show how cool it is that iMessage will now tell your contacts if you are in Do Not Disturb (and allow them to override it). You can opt out, of course, but I guess people really like the busy indicator?
mynameishere 4y ago
Sometimes I will type a few random characters as an ack, and to let the person know that I am going to respond.
izzydata 4y ago
Perhaps it should be more obvious to everyone if the particular form of communication you are using is meant to be synchronous or asynchronous. Talking on the phone is clearly synchronous and sending emails is clearly asynchronous. However everything else seems to have gotten confusing. People have started moving what was traditionally forum based long term asynchronous communication to Discord.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Yeah, this distinction is also melded with a persistent/live distinction. I know in reddit/hn/forum I can go back at the end of the day and read everything I missed, so it's 'obviously' asynchronous. Mentally, I don't feel the same way about slack, because it's hard to continue a conversation that happened earlier.. I guess threads could make this easier.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Reddit actually has typing indicators now. "2 people are typing" it says when you make a top level comment. (They removed a bunch of features from "Old Reddit" that I liked, so I gave in and use "New Reddit" now. Sigh.)
  - indymike 4y ago
    Slack threads are not fun.
dbbk 4y ago
This sounds, and looks, just the same as Twist
atto 4y ago
If you're stuck using Slack and don't like their behavior of sharing typing status, I made a browser extension years ago that blocks that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slack-hide-typing/oeedcdnohdcpcadbjakljhnmdlhcgnch https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slack-hide-typing/...
- kazinator 4y ago
  Have you ever used the BSD ntalk program? You can see every keystroke of the other party, in the opposite split of the screen. It's awesome: people complete each other's sentences, or stop typing when the other person is saying the same obvious thing. You can say " , ... what's that word again ...?" and the other person will help, then you can backspace over that and continue your sentence. I've not ntalked in probably over 25 years. Sheesh!
  - grokblah 4y ago
    I miss chatting with that! It was so interactive. I wonder if it could be translated to communication between more than two parties. It sure would be interesting to see a prototype of something like that.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      That's Ytalk; also ancient, and uses the same protocol. https://linux.die.net/man/1/ytalk https://linux.die.net/man/1/ytalk I seem to recall seeing people use that around the undergraduate CS lab. I should have mentioned that what was new (to me) when I was introduced to talk/ntalk was the concurrency of the split screen: both parties just clacking away at the same time As a user of dial-up BBSes, I had often chatted 1:1 with sysops, nor as a sysop with users. The BBS sysop chat implementations were different/simpler; both parties were typing into the same space. This required manners: taking turns, letting the other people finish their sentence. That's the same like a Windows user being remotely assisted today: you and the remote admin can both move the mouse cursor or type into the same edit boxes.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
karolzlot 4y ago
I can't find pricing of Cardinal. Do they have free tier?
- andkenneth 4y ago
  Seems like everything has to go through a sales call so I'd assume not.
- commondream 4y ago
  We're really early on and are generally just giving access to folks for the time being, so please don't hesitate to reach out. We don't have pricing listed because we're still figuring it out.
  - buildbuildbuild 4y ago
    Please be more clear about this in your site's "Predictable pricing" section. Google results for "site:withcardinal.com pricing" link to 404 errors at withcardinal.com/pricing - this feels misaligned with predictability. Best of luck to you!
  - esperent 4y ago
    One of the first things I do when evaluating any new app is navigate to /pricing to see whether they have clear pricing. If they don't, I bounce straight out of there. I actually am in the market for a new chat app for a company I'm building and actively researching this right now. But until you have a /pricing page I'm not going to consider your app. I'm not interested in going through the rigmarole of contacting sales to find this out. > Predictable pricing Fixed rate pricing means your team will always know what you’re spending on Cardinal. We’ve got plans for teams of all sizes and usage levels, from startup to enterprise Given that you don't actually have _any_ pricing, predictable or otherwise, this is currently a total fabrication and should be removed from your website until you sort this out.
    - commondream 4y ago
      I totally get it and support your take of not signing up for a product that you can't see public pricing for. That said, no one ever said we don't have pricing. It's just not publicly listed at present because we're very early in our journey, are learning a ton about helping teams on-board, and also focusing on helping communities that are currently not well served by other pricing models. We meant the predictable bit to be more like a promise on our part. We'll talk to you, we'll give you clear pricing once we get a good picture of what you're looking for and how we can help you, and we'll stick with it so you're not thinking about the monthly price of our service on top of another 8-12 on average that you need to add for each new team member. All that said, I'm going to review that on the site today and find ways to clarify what we mean so that we're clearer.
kibwen 4y ago
Typing status is one of the worst UX misfeatures ever devised, and any app that includes them automatically comes across as amateurish, as though the project manager was just ticking boxes rather than actually bothering to consider the experience of using the app. I applaud any attempt to put more nails in this coffin.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The feature definitely has a “developer though this would be cool because websockets can do it” kind of a feel.
HappyTypist 4y ago
Things I wish messaging apps had: 1. Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction. 2. Auto-deleting of messages in a DM after X _messages_ (e.g. only the last 100 messages are retained as scrollback). It forces you to document knowledge in more suitable forms; than having it lost in DM silos. Furthermore, it keeps conversations with your regular contacts more candid and natural; but retains the information and context for infrequent contacts. 3. No typing status (thanks Cardinal!)
- commondream 4y ago
  > Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction. Cardinal does this! You just share with someone else and you can expand or change the discussion as needed.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  2 is interesting but I would definitely want a minimum retention of a couple days. It sounds awful to have your messages rolling over into the shredder mid-conversation.
- vimy 4y ago
  Whatsapp has 1.
fleddr 4y ago
Typing status aside, there's nothing worse than a semi-realtime conversation. A true realtime conversation, rapid chat replies, is fine and sometimes needed when something important is happening. A true async conversation that is slow and may take days, is also fine. A semi-realtime conversation though is the horror. A "realtime" conversation where for some reason the other party takes 2 minutes to type any response, every single message. The 2 minutes is enough of a wait to get enraged but too short to go do something else. My solution: call the person unannounced. Just say: "I figured it'd be quicker to talk directly". This forces them to drop whatever the hell else they were doing and get to the damn point. Intrusive? No. Not if you let me wait a full hour for what should be a 5 minute interaction.
- sugarpile 4y ago
  Sounds like a great way to get those two minutes to turn into two hours from here on out and all your calls “accidentally missed.”
  - fleddr 4y ago
    You don't get it. I didn't start the conversation. You requested my help but can't be bothered to maintain a smooth conversation. If you take two hours to reply to a request you initiated yourself, that's not a problem for me, more like a solution.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Some people are not that fast in either thinking or typing or are careful in their responses, or struggle with the language, some people are not comfortable talking on the phone. Some are both... I know at least one such person and I would not miss them for the world.
- franga2000 4y ago
  I agree that it's frustrating, but your "solution" is extremely self-centered. I might not be getting much out of the conversation or even want to be a part of it in the forst place. In that case, if responding slowly works better for me, you forcing me to give you my attention adds a huge cost to my side of the equation. To use an example: if you're texting me to help you fix your printer while I'm working, I might give you a small bit of my attention out of "generosity" (not the right term but close enough). I'm not getting anything out of this, but I'm not losing much either. But if you want to completely interrupt my flow and force me to give you all or none of my attention, fuck your printer. I have better things to do.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> Inclusive By Default > We all tend to operate within explicit and implicit hierarchies within our teams. Explicitly we know we have a manager we should defer to, and that there are executives and other roles that are important to the team. Implicitly we know there are people with more experience in particular topics or simply more social capital within the team. If you see someone above you in either of those hierarchies, you're more likely to pause and listen, and potentially to decide it's not worth the effort to bring your ideas forward. > Our goal by removing typing indicators is to help teams build environments where anyone can think through an idea and bring it forward without having to wait for those above them to speak up first. We want everyone to feel included in discussions when they have an important idea to bring to the table. We make a chat app for teams with a clear chain of command (I don’t know just going by context). By removing this one super-modern chat app quirk we will be able to say that we are “inclusive by default”, even though the whole context that your team operates in contradicts our stated aim. I don’t know I just think that the hierarchy of the group trumps such trivialities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- commondream 4y ago
  I can see where that opinion on how I wrote it comes up. My meaning was more that most teams operate with a defined chain of command and another implicit seniority/culture structure. We're trying to find interesting ways to be more inclusive of people lower in those structures by not prompting them to wait for those above them to finish speaking before they go ahead and share their own ideas. Hierarchies definitely trump those trivialities and are a huge hurdle to being more inclusive, but we also see these small tweaks as steps in the right direction.
yieldcrv 4y ago
I think its interesting that this article isn't about your opinion on typing status, its about the user story they are building that messenger for. Yet most of the comments are about an opinion on typing status in general. So... what do people think about the cardinal messenger and their exclusion of typing status?
- gog 4y ago
  I guess not enough people are using Cardinal for a meaningful discussion on that specifically.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
zulip allows configuring both your “typing” indicator and online status indication. Twist takes it one step further and has no online indicator at all; twist is a somewhat different paradigm though.
seydor 4y ago
Too much marketing fluff around a minor resource optimization
jaimehrubiks 4y ago
MS Teams has the worst ever "typing status" implementation I've ever seen. In certain cases it shows you're typing by just having the conversation opened, which is extremely frustrating. Maybe just because the cursor is in the text box. It should only show typing if I have at least 1 letter...
- gabereiser 4y ago
  And a timeout of at most 3 seconds in case you pause typing.
- radarsat1 4y ago
  Maybe it's because I use the Linux client, but my experience is that MS Teams is the worst ever implementation of every single facet of chat and video communications. It's really the one popular application out there that seems to have absolutely no redeeming factors, and I'm constantly confused by why it has the uptake it has. I can only conclude that it has more to do with companies preferring Microsoft than because they actually like it, or that it satisfies some policy/legal reasons, (eg. I've heard it's more GDPR compliant.) But purely as software, it's actually the most terrible user experience I've ever had. I really don't get it.
  - suprfnk 4y ago
    > It's really the one popular application out there that seems to have absolutely no redeeming factors, and I'm constantly confused by why it has the uptake it has. I agree about MS Teams being very terrible. I attribute the uptake it has solely to a lot of companies already working with Office 365 (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc) and getting Teams for free -- so why pay for another chat app?
  - Jaruzel 4y ago
    As we're snarking on MS Teams, let's talk about the fake DnD status, which has been deliberately implementated as a non-functional visual indicator only - it doesn't change the notification behaviour of teams at all, and if you work in culture that totally ignores status indicators, you will get pinged on teams all day even if you have DnD set. Skype for Business had a working DnD, and they chose not to keep the same functionality when MSTeams replaced it.
TrevorJ 4y ago
As an aside, I'd love a chat app that sends each character as it is typed, simply for the pure chaos of it.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  This is how it was for a lot of "SysOp chat" systems in the BBS days. Sometimes the two parties wren't even in separate sections of the chat, they were effectively just having a discussion in a shared text document.
- sidibe 4y ago
  Google Wave
  - BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
    Google Docs
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Try talk[1] some time -- it's a live connection to the other user's TTY, so they see everything you type, typos and all. You can't even type simultaneously, since the messages would intermingle; you need to wait for the other person to signal that they're finished. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    I always preferred ytalk, then your own window to type in. (The screen was split in an upper and lower half and you had one or the other.)
    - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
      I believe ntalk has 2-way split windows as well. I think that's what I have installed on my Linux server, and a couple of my friends have accounts there too. Ntalk is my second favorite way of communicating after in-person face-to-face talking.
wolverine876 4y ago
> In most discussion apps that show your typing status, you feel pressure to wait for your peers to finish typing and sending a message before typing one yourself. > wait for those above them to speak up first Do others think of these as universal rules? Common? Situational? Non-existent? Reading the OP, I fear I don't know the rules at all. I've participated in online forums in every medium and for a long time, and never thought about these. Maybe I've been disruptive or rude without realizing it. :(
- commondream 4y ago
  OP here - we've done a lot of talking and interviewing people about their thoughts on other communication tools, and these are definitely common threads. That said, I don't know that they're universal. Also I think a ton of people judge themselves significantly more harshly than they judge others when it comes to communicating online at work (although yes, judging others harshly is also certainly a thing).
tgmatt 4y ago
Anyone remember Google Wave? My friends and I used to have conversations and being able to see live input on multiple threads was so good for speeding up conversations as you'd be able to see what they're all typing at the same time. Shame that got canned.
- addingnumbers 4y ago
  Wave did their marketing push when it was invite-only. The invites were going for $50-$100 on eBay. A lot of people like me weren't rich or well-connected enough to try it if they wanted. It went on like that for ten months, then with very little fanfare they opened it to everyone. I didn't find out they finally made it generally available until three months later when they said they were shutting it down due to lack of interest. I'd say there wasn't a lack of interest, there was a bumbling misalignment of its hype cycle and its availability.
kamroot 4y ago
This article touches on something that I have been recently thinking about - remote work vs. async work. Remote work is in vogue these days but a lot of these companies don't allow or encourage async work. They equate remote work with async work but then institute tools like slack which are antithetical to async work. Typing indicators are one such way where slack encourages synchronous work.
- marcooliv 4y ago
  slack makes you offline when you stay away from the keyboard for a couple of minutes.
  - ollien 4y ago
    A couple of my coworkers are perpetually offline on Slack, actually. It allows them to be more async.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Typing indicators are an anti pattern imo but async work doesn't seem like a desirable thing. Very few people are doing jobs where they can just go offline for a day and come back with a result. Most work, especially software development requires frequent communication. Being able to quickly bounce ideas off people and verify your plans before committing to them is so valuable. I can't count how many times I have been right in the middle of something, had to make a questionable choice, spoken to a coworker just to verify the idea, and they tell me something that completely changes the outcome. Being able to get this done within the hour vs getting it right at the end in review is so valuable.
  - michaelchisari 4y ago
    | Most work, especially software development requires frequent communication. This hasn't been my experience. Long periods of deep focus are more important than constant connection.
    - 4y ago
PikachuEXE 4y ago
Probably related: Async-First Communication https://blog.doist.com/async-first/ https://blog.doist.com/async-first/
phforms 4y ago
Glad someone brings up this issue. Intrusive and “slippery” UI made me use external text editors to write most of what I send on web platforms. I have social anxiety and even the thought that someone can see that I am writing stresses me out because then I feel pressured to send something to not keep them waiting (and I am a very slow writer). It is similar when I see someone else writing. I understand that this may not be an issue for most people, but for me it is just another stress factor which keeps me from interacting with other people (other examples are the reading checkmark and the uncertainty if hitting enter sends the message or not). It would be fine for me if it was opt-in or at least can be turned off.
- enlyth 4y ago
  I don't have social anxiety and I still feel pressure from the 'is typing' like you say, so I disable it whenever I can. Usually this means you can't also see whether the other person is typing, but I don't care, I try to give people the time they need to reply.
  - kqr 4y ago
    In many cases, you can only disable it on your end, meaning that you don't see when others are typing, but they still see when you are typing. That actually works out fine for me, because after I have had it turned off for a while, I forget that the software even has the feature, so although other people see when I'm typing, I don't know that they see it, which is what matters to me!
    - joe5150 4y ago
      I’ve seen the setting be symmetrical in more apps, which is nice. The last one I noticed had this feature is Microsoft Teams.
- izoow 4y ago
  I also do this with almost everything I write. I always have a Sublime Text window open with a bunch of unsaved tabs that I use as a buffer space for everything and copy paste it when I’m done. Another reason is persistence. If a webpage decides to refresh or my browser or system crashes, my textarea content is gone. Sublime Text remembers those unsaved tabs no matter what.
Aeolun 4y ago
You also don’t show pricing :/ For what it’s worth, it does sound like an interesting app with the right ideas.
- commondream 4y ago
  We're very early on with selling Cardinal to teams, and are working hard to make sure we get the pricing structure perfect. If you want to reach out we'd love to help get you set up with an account that you can test for free, and we'll work with you to figure out pricing that makes great sense for your team. We're committed to making sure that our pricing isn't per-user, because we don't believe in charging a team more every time they add a new member, regardless of how much that member uses the app.
psoots 4y ago
Chat is not asynchronous communication. It's not the best synchronous communication, sure, but it's certainly not asynchronous. Dropping typing indicators isn't necessarily going to make everything more asynchronous. There are business patterns and pressures that push us to need realtime or semi-realtime answers. And so often, the tool we use for that is chat. True asynchronous communication is a change in business, not just the tools we use. Typing indicators can be useful in some situations. It's nice not having to wait for someone to finish a thought to know that an issue is being addressed. Heavyweights can jump into a conversation and pause it immediately so people aren't spinning their wheels trying to figure out something they really don't know much about. It's also useful in 1:1 chats to know if the person on the other side is there or not. If I don't see an indicator (or read-receipt) in the next few seconds, I'll go make another cup of coffee.
dpcan 4y ago
This is awkward. I don’t wait. In fact I try to get my comment out before anyone else when I see someone is typing. Hmm.
MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
At a place where I used to work, event systems triggered by the in-house instant messaging app were inundated with "typing status change" events. They could be filtered out, but it made me think I'd resist that feature in my instant messenger app.

250 points by commondream 4y ago

I wish Matrix/Element had optional read receipts and typing status. In some circumstances, I prefer to avoid the artificial time pressure added by the knowledge that others can see when you have read their messages, as well as the sense of commitment from starting to type a message.

feanaro 4y ago
Typing status is already optional, private read receipts are just about to land in Synapse I think.
- Arathorn 4y ago
  https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2285 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/228... is the thing to track.

nickdothutton 4y ago

I’ve never heard of Cardinal but I liked the fact you could actually see what people were typing, character by character, in ytalk. Sped up a lot of conversations.

dilap 4y ago
that's interesting. i've never used chat that does this, but i have seen a lot of claims it was a misfeature in google wave back in the day. but still, i could see it being ok, more like verbal conversation. i defnly agree w/ the linked article that the middle ground of "<soandso> is typing" is a misfeature. the only possible response to that information is to sit there waiting, which is annoying/pointless. (but nothing beats verbal comms, still. downside of course is that it is "extremely synchronous" and does not archive well.)
geoffjentry 4y ago
I found it often the opposite with ytalk. Yes, some people would just plow through it and make the best of things. And one could already be thinking about a response in real time. But other people would find the need to correct every typo. And it was painful as crap watching someone with a 5 WPM typing speed and an affinity for typos to get through what they were trying to say. And eventually you move past thinking about a response in real time to screaming "JUST STOP TYPING ALREADY!!!!"
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  I just start typing my response, or finish the thought for them, maybe with a question mark to give them room to correct me if I mis-predicted. I've spent many hours using ntalk and I love it. It is true though that it lowers the fun when the other person is a slow typist.
Aloha 4y ago
I came here to say this, I would love a service like this.

KerrAvon 4y ago

Non-disableable typing indicators is one of the few things I very much dislike about Slack. I don't want people to see whether I'm typing, and this means I have to use an external editor. (The big other thing is @here/@channel notifications by default being on. No fucking thanks -- I turn that shit off on almost every channel.)

sys_64738 4y ago
This ^ - being forced to use an external editor to type you response then copy/paste defeats the purpose. Plus Slack is such a POS anyway. I also hate the distraction of the crap notifications. Humans are not interrupt-driven creatures.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  so long as we're dogpiling Slack, let me add in my complaint: You can't mute Slackbot, and Slackbot sends a LOT of dumb and pointless messages about channel management. At work they're constantly adding thousands of people to "watch party" or other random channels, then archiving those channels later on, and I keep getting notifications from Slackbot about them. I was trying to keep Slack notifications unmuted in case my manager needs something from me, but I was just getting too much useless crap from Slackbot. Finally I had to mute it completely and tell him to call my cell if anything comes up
  - gkop 4y ago
    Huh, I enjoy a muted slackbot. Are you sure it’s not just that you can’t mute slackbot when a personal at-mention is “injected” in slackbot’s message? Because yea that’s annoying af. That comes from slack app developers not understanding the platform though. At-mentions should only be used with intention, and obviously an at-mention in a DM is completely unnecessary.
- wruza 4y ago
  What’s wrong with someone seeing that you are typing? Seriously.

samtimalsina 4y ago

Never heard of Cardinal either, and I like that they don't show typing status. If I see someone is typing in a Slack channel, or typing to me privately, it takes all my focus away until it is complete. Interesting though that they don't show their pricing on the website. Why's that?

barkingcat 4y ago
that means a person can DOS you by typing and erasing text but never sending you a message?
- das_keyboard 4y ago
  Just typing something and then not sending a message puts me out of order for about 5 minutes while I'm waiting if there is a message coming. And then another 10 minutes while I'm speculating what he could have wanted from me.
- samtimalsina 4y ago
  People do that?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Happens often enough that people start responding but then realize they don’t actually have anything useful to say right now (“never mind”).
  - andkenneth 4y ago
    There's that one guy who built a bot that automatically sends the typing signal back whenever it detects someone typing. Very funny prank.
commondream 4y ago
Hey! We're super early on in our journey and are figuring out pricing. If you reach out through the site we'll get you set up with an account and work with you to figure out what's reasonable for your team price-wise. We're focused on making sure pricing isn't per-user because it's annoying to pay an additional bit of rent for each new person on the team regardless of how much they use an app.

joshstrange 4y ago

On the flip side I greatly prefer the indicator. It lets me know if I should wait for a response or move on to other things. When I message someone I wait a few seconds to see if they start typing and if they do I just wait and if not I can start focusing on something different.

layer8 4y ago
Often enough people start typing but then decide to not respond after all (or not right away), so you end up waiting for nothing.
- cgriswald 4y ago
  Or they're fat-fingered like me and accidentally click a character while trying to close the message app.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Or a “spit it out” response
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Groxx 4y ago
And if the typing goes on for more than 5 minutes, you know you're going to need to get a drink and sit down for a while. yeah - typing indicators are handy. Personally I want something that does opt-in. I'll happily share my indicators with people I communicate with regularly, it can be extremely useful to know if a message that's time-sensitive but doesn't require a response was seen ("grab milk too"). I sure as heck don't want to for most public-ish comms though. And I am entirely fine telling people that "I enable it for ~5 people and you are not one of them".
wildrhythms 4y ago
Whats wrong with a simple acknowledgement message like, "ok give me a min" I still do this even with today's typing statuses and I think people recognize the importance of a simple ack

walrus01 4y ago

i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like. In addition to the problems with having an app that sends an indicator to the other party that somebody is actively typing. I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a contact. Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is opaque to me and I'm totally fine with that. One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead. In things like facebook messenger I bet that 99% of users never dig into the settings to turn OFF the "show your activity status to other people" option. For something like a work place communication tools such as Slack I can understand the purpose of setting yourself active or idle manually to indicate whether you're available for messages, or in a different time zone, or whatever. That's a different use case.

sroussey 4y ago
I never had a phone number for anyone I chatted with on IRC. Same with ICQ.
hbn 4y ago
I don't even like read receipts for casual communication apps. I feel like they only cause stress. I don't want people to know if I'm read something because I may have read it but be too busy to respond and need to come back to it later, but I don't want the person thinking I'm ignoring them. And on the other side of things, I don't want to stress myself out repeatedly checking if someone read my message.
easton 4y ago
It’s interesting, because I remember Steve or somebody saying this was a selling point of iMessage. “No busy indicator, no offline state, just send your message and they’ll get it on all of their devices”. Then at the last WWDC they go up there and show how cool it is that iMessage will now tell your contacts if you are in Do Not Disturb (and allow them to override it). You can opt out, of course, but I guess people really like the busy indicator?

mynameishere 4y ago

Sometimes I will type a few random characters as an ack, and to let the person know that I am going to respond.

izzydata 4y ago

Perhaps it should be more obvious to everyone if the particular form of communication you are using is meant to be synchronous or asynchronous. Talking on the phone is clearly synchronous and sending emails is clearly asynchronous. However everything else seems to have gotten confusing. People have started moving what was traditionally forum based long term asynchronous communication to Discord.

mikkergp 4y ago
Yeah, this distinction is also melded with a persistent/live distinction. I know in reddit/hn/forum I can go back at the end of the day and read everything I missed, so it's 'obviously' asynchronous. Mentally, I don't feel the same way about slack, because it's hard to continue a conversation that happened earlier.. I guess threads could make this easier.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Reddit actually has typing indicators now. "2 people are typing" it says when you make a top level comment. (They removed a bunch of features from "Old Reddit" that I liked, so I gave in and use "New Reddit" now. Sigh.)
- indymike 4y ago
  Slack threads are not fun.

dbbk 4y ago

This sounds, and looks, just the same as Twist

atto 4y ago

If you're stuck using Slack and don't like their behavior of sharing typing status, I made a browser extension years ago that blocks that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slack-hide-typing/oeedcdnohdcpcadbjakljhnmdlhcgnch https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slack-hide-typing/...

kazinator 4y ago
Have you ever used the BSD ntalk program? You can see every keystroke of the other party, in the opposite split of the screen. It's awesome: people complete each other's sentences, or stop typing when the other person is saying the same obvious thing. You can say " , ... what's that word again ...?" and the other person will help, then you can backspace over that and continue your sentence. I've not ntalked in probably over 25 years. Sheesh!
- grokblah 4y ago
  I miss chatting with that! It was so interactive. I wonder if it could be translated to communication between more than two parties. It sure would be interesting to see a prototype of something like that.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    That's Ytalk; also ancient, and uses the same protocol. https://linux.die.net/man/1/ytalk https://linux.die.net/man/1/ytalk I seem to recall seeing people use that around the undergraduate CS lab. I should have mentioned that what was new (to me) when I was introduced to talk/ntalk was the concurrency of the split screen: both parties just clacking away at the same time As a user of dial-up BBSes, I had often chatted 1:1 with sysops, nor as a sysop with users. The BBS sysop chat implementations were different/simpler; both parties were typing into the same space. This required manners: taking turns, letting the other people finish their sentence. That's the same like a Windows user being remotely assisted today: you and the remote admin can both move the mouse cursor or type into the same edit boxes.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago

karolzlot 4y ago

I can't find pricing of Cardinal. Do they have free tier?

andkenneth 4y ago
Seems like everything has to go through a sales call so I'd assume not.
commondream 4y ago
We're really early on and are generally just giving access to folks for the time being, so please don't hesitate to reach out. We don't have pricing listed because we're still figuring it out.
- buildbuildbuild 4y ago
  Please be more clear about this in your site's "Predictable pricing" section. Google results for "site:withcardinal.com pricing" link to 404 errors at withcardinal.com/pricing - this feels misaligned with predictability. Best of luck to you!
- esperent 4y ago
  One of the first things I do when evaluating any new app is navigate to /pricing to see whether they have clear pricing. If they don't, I bounce straight out of there. I actually am in the market for a new chat app for a company I'm building and actively researching this right now. But until you have a /pricing page I'm not going to consider your app. I'm not interested in going through the rigmarole of contacting sales to find this out. > Predictable pricing Fixed rate pricing means your team will always know what you’re spending on Cardinal. We’ve got plans for teams of all sizes and usage levels, from startup to enterprise Given that you don't actually have _any_ pricing, predictable or otherwise, this is currently a total fabrication and should be removed from your website until you sort this out.
  - commondream 4y ago
    I totally get it and support your take of not signing up for a product that you can't see public pricing for. That said, no one ever said we don't have pricing. It's just not publicly listed at present because we're very early in our journey, are learning a ton about helping teams on-board, and also focusing on helping communities that are currently not well served by other pricing models. We meant the predictable bit to be more like a promise on our part. We'll talk to you, we'll give you clear pricing once we get a good picture of what you're looking for and how we can help you, and we'll stick with it so you're not thinking about the monthly price of our service on top of another 8-12 on average that you need to add for each new team member. All that said, I'm going to review that on the site today and find ways to clarify what we mean so that we're clearer.

kibwen 4y ago

Typing status is one of the worst UX misfeatures ever devised, and any app that includes them automatically comes across as amateurish, as though the project manager was just ticking boxes rather than actually bothering to consider the experience of using the app. I applaud any attempt to put more nails in this coffin.

quickthrower2 4y ago
The feature definitely has a “developer though this would be cool because websockets can do it” kind of a feel.

HappyTypist 4y ago

Things I wish messaging apps had: 1. Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction. 2. Auto-deleting of messages in a DM after X _messages_ (e.g. only the last 100 messages are retained as scrollback). It forces you to document knowledge in more suitable forms; than having it lost in DM silos. Furthermore, it keeps conversations with your regular contacts more candid and natural; but retains the information and context for infrequent contacts. 3. No typing status (thanks Cardinal!)

commondream 4y ago
> Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction. Cardinal does this! You just share with someone else and you can expand or change the discussion as needed.
Dylan16807 4y ago
2 is interesting but I would definitely want a minimum retention of a couple days. It sounds awful to have your messages rolling over into the shredder mid-conversation.
vimy 4y ago
Whatsapp has 1.

fleddr 4y ago

Typing status aside, there's nothing worse than a semi-realtime conversation. A true realtime conversation, rapid chat replies, is fine and sometimes needed when something important is happening. A true async conversation that is slow and may take days, is also fine. A semi-realtime conversation though is the horror. A "realtime" conversation where for some reason the other party takes 2 minutes to type any response, every single message. The 2 minutes is enough of a wait to get enraged but too short to go do something else. My solution: call the person unannounced. Just say: "I figured it'd be quicker to talk directly". This forces them to drop whatever the hell else they were doing and get to the damn point. Intrusive? No. Not if you let me wait a full hour for what should be a 5 minute interaction.

sugarpile 4y ago
Sounds like a great way to get those two minutes to turn into two hours from here on out and all your calls “accidentally missed.”
- fleddr 4y ago
  You don't get it. I didn't start the conversation. You requested my help but can't be bothered to maintain a smooth conversation. If you take two hours to reply to a request you initiated yourself, that's not a problem for me, more like a solution.
jacquesm 4y ago
Some people are not that fast in either thinking or typing or are careful in their responses, or struggle with the language, some people are not comfortable talking on the phone. Some are both... I know at least one such person and I would not miss them for the world.
franga2000 4y ago
I agree that it's frustrating, but your "solution" is extremely self-centered. I might not be getting much out of the conversation or even want to be a part of it in the forst place. In that case, if responding slowly works better for me, you forcing me to give you my attention adds a huge cost to my side of the equation. To use an example: if you're texting me to help you fix your printer while I'm working, I might give you a small bit of my attention out of "generosity" (not the right term but close enough). I'm not getting anything out of this, but I'm not losing much either. But if you want to completely interrupt my flow and force me to give you all or none of my attention, fuck your printer. I have better things to do.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> Inclusive By Default > We all tend to operate within explicit and implicit hierarchies within our teams. Explicitly we know we have a manager we should defer to, and that there are executives and other roles that are important to the team. Implicitly we know there are people with more experience in particular topics or simply more social capital within the team. If you see someone above you in either of those hierarchies, you're more likely to pause and listen, and potentially to decide it's not worth the effort to bring your ideas forward. > Our goal by removing typing indicators is to help teams build environments where anyone can think through an idea and bring it forward without having to wait for those above them to speak up first. We want everyone to feel included in discussions when they have an important idea to bring to the table. We make a chat app for teams with a clear chain of command (I don’t know just going by context). By removing this one super-modern chat app quirk we will be able to say that we are “inclusive by default”, even though the whole context that your team operates in contradicts our stated aim. I don’t know I just think that the hierarchy of the group trumps such trivialities.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
commondream 4y ago
I can see where that opinion on how I wrote it comes up. My meaning was more that most teams operate with a defined chain of command and another implicit seniority/culture structure. We're trying to find interesting ways to be more inclusive of people lower in those structures by not prompting them to wait for those above them to finish speaking before they go ahead and share their own ideas. Hierarchies definitely trump those trivialities and are a huge hurdle to being more inclusive, but we also see these small tweaks as steps in the right direction.

yieldcrv 4y ago

I think its interesting that this article isn't about your opinion on typing status, its about the user story they are building that messenger for. Yet most of the comments are about an opinion on typing status in general. So... what do people think about the cardinal messenger and their exclusion of typing status?

gog 4y ago
I guess not enough people are using Cardinal for a meaningful discussion on that specifically.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

zulip allows configuring both your “typing” indicator and online status indication. Twist takes it one step further and has no online indicator at all; twist is a somewhat different paradigm though.

seydor 4y ago

Too much marketing fluff around a minor resource optimization

jaimehrubiks 4y ago

MS Teams has the worst ever "typing status" implementation I've ever seen. In certain cases it shows you're typing by just having the conversation opened, which is extremely frustrating. Maybe just because the cursor is in the text box. It should only show typing if I have at least 1 letter...

gabereiser 4y ago
And a timeout of at most 3 seconds in case you pause typing.
radarsat1 4y ago
Maybe it's because I use the Linux client, but my experience is that MS Teams is the worst ever implementation of every single facet of chat and video communications. It's really the one popular application out there that seems to have absolutely no redeeming factors, and I'm constantly confused by why it has the uptake it has. I can only conclude that it has more to do with companies preferring Microsoft than because they actually like it, or that it satisfies some policy/legal reasons, (eg. I've heard it's more GDPR compliant.) But purely as software, it's actually the most terrible user experience I've ever had. I really don't get it.
- suprfnk 4y ago
  > It's really the one popular application out there that seems to have absolutely no redeeming factors, and I'm constantly confused by why it has the uptake it has. I agree about MS Teams being very terrible. I attribute the uptake it has solely to a lot of companies already working with Office 365 (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc) and getting Teams for free -- so why pay for another chat app?
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  As we're snarking on MS Teams, let's talk about the fake DnD status, which has been deliberately implementated as a non-functional visual indicator only - it doesn't change the notification behaviour of teams at all, and if you work in culture that totally ignores status indicators, you will get pinged on teams all day even if you have DnD set. Skype for Business had a working DnD, and they chose not to keep the same functionality when MSTeams replaced it.

TrevorJ 4y ago

As an aside, I'd love a chat app that sends each character as it is typed, simply for the pure chaos of it.

karaterobot 4y ago
This is how it was for a lot of "SysOp chat" systems in the BBS days. Sometimes the two parties wren't even in separate sections of the chat, they were effectively just having a discussion in a shared text document.
sidibe 4y ago
Google Wave
- BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
  Google Docs
woodruffw 4y ago
Try talk[1] some time -- it's a live connection to the other user's TTY, so they see everything you type, typos and all. You can't even type simultaneously, since the messages would intermingle; you need to wait for the other person to signal that they're finished. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I always preferred ytalk, then your own window to type in. (The screen was split in an upper and lower half and you had one or the other.)
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    I believe ntalk has 2-way split windows as well. I think that's what I have installed on my Linux server, and a couple of my friends have accounts there too. Ntalk is my second favorite way of communicating after in-person face-to-face talking.

wolverine876 4y ago

> In most discussion apps that show your typing status, you feel pressure to wait for your peers to finish typing and sending a message before typing one yourself. > wait for those above them to speak up first Do others think of these as universal rules? Common? Situational? Non-existent? Reading the OP, I fear I don't know the rules at all. I've participated in online forums in every medium and for a long time, and never thought about these. Maybe I've been disruptive or rude without realizing it. :(

commondream 4y ago
OP here - we've done a lot of talking and interviewing people about their thoughts on other communication tools, and these are definitely common threads. That said, I don't know that they're universal. Also I think a ton of people judge themselves significantly more harshly than they judge others when it comes to communicating online at work (although yes, judging others harshly is also certainly a thing).

tgmatt 4y ago

Anyone remember Google Wave? My friends and I used to have conversations and being able to see live input on multiple threads was so good for speeding up conversations as you'd be able to see what they're all typing at the same time. Shame that got canned.

addingnumbers 4y ago
Wave did their marketing push when it was invite-only. The invites were going for $50-$100 on eBay. A lot of people like me weren't rich or well-connected enough to try it if they wanted. It went on like that for ten months, then with very little fanfare they opened it to everyone. I didn't find out they finally made it generally available until three months later when they said they were shutting it down due to lack of interest. I'd say there wasn't a lack of interest, there was a bumbling misalignment of its hype cycle and its availability.

kamroot 4y ago

This article touches on something that I have been recently thinking about - remote work vs. async work. Remote work is in vogue these days but a lot of these companies don't allow or encourage async work. They equate remote work with async work but then institute tools like slack which are antithetical to async work. Typing indicators are one such way where slack encourages synchronous work.

marcooliv 4y ago
slack makes you offline when you stay away from the keyboard for a couple of minutes.
- ollien 4y ago
  A couple of my coworkers are perpetually offline on Slack, actually. It allows them to be more async.
Gigachad 4y ago
Typing indicators are an anti pattern imo but async work doesn't seem like a desirable thing. Very few people are doing jobs where they can just go offline for a day and come back with a result. Most work, especially software development requires frequent communication. Being able to quickly bounce ideas off people and verify your plans before committing to them is so valuable. I can't count how many times I have been right in the middle of something, had to make a questionable choice, spoken to a coworker just to verify the idea, and they tell me something that completely changes the outcome. Being able to get this done within the hour vs getting it right at the end in review is so valuable.
- michaelchisari 4y ago
  | Most work, especially software development requires frequent communication. This hasn't been my experience. Long periods of deep focus are more important than constant connection.
  - 4y ago

PikachuEXE 4y ago

Probably related: Async-First Communication https://blog.doist.com/async-first/ https://blog.doist.com/async-first/

phforms 4y ago

Glad someone brings up this issue. Intrusive and “slippery” UI made me use external text editors to write most of what I send on web platforms. I have social anxiety and even the thought that someone can see that I am writing stresses me out because then I feel pressured to send something to not keep them waiting (and I am a very slow writer). It is similar when I see someone else writing. I understand that this may not be an issue for most people, but for me it is just another stress factor which keeps me from interacting with other people (other examples are the reading checkmark and the uncertainty if hitting enter sends the message or not). It would be fine for me if it was opt-in or at least can be turned off.

enlyth 4y ago
I don't have social anxiety and I still feel pressure from the 'is typing' like you say, so I disable it whenever I can. Usually this means you can't also see whether the other person is typing, but I don't care, I try to give people the time they need to reply.
- kqr 4y ago
  In many cases, you can only disable it on your end, meaning that you don't see when others are typing, but they still see when you are typing. That actually works out fine for me, because after I have had it turned off for a while, I forget that the software even has the feature, so although other people see when I'm typing, I don't know that they see it, which is what matters to me!
  - joe5150 4y ago
    I’ve seen the setting be symmetrical in more apps, which is nice. The last one I noticed had this feature is Microsoft Teams.
izoow 4y ago
I also do this with almost everything I write. I always have a Sublime Text window open with a bunch of unsaved tabs that I use as a buffer space for everything and copy paste it when I’m done. Another reason is persistence. If a webpage decides to refresh or my browser or system crashes, my textarea content is gone. Sublime Text remembers those unsaved tabs no matter what.

Aeolun 4y ago

You also don’t show pricing :/ For what it’s worth, it does sound like an interesting app with the right ideas.

commondream 4y ago
We're very early on with selling Cardinal to teams, and are working hard to make sure we get the pricing structure perfect. If you want to reach out we'd love to help get you set up with an account that you can test for free, and we'll work with you to figure out pricing that makes great sense for your team. We're committed to making sure that our pricing isn't per-user, because we don't believe in charging a team more every time they add a new member, regardless of how much that member uses the app.

psoots 4y ago

Chat is not asynchronous communication. It's not the best synchronous communication, sure, but it's certainly not asynchronous. Dropping typing indicators isn't necessarily going to make everything more asynchronous. There are business patterns and pressures that push us to need realtime or semi-realtime answers. And so often, the tool we use for that is chat. True asynchronous communication is a change in business, not just the tools we use. Typing indicators can be useful in some situations. It's nice not having to wait for someone to finish a thought to know that an issue is being addressed. Heavyweights can jump into a conversation and pause it immediately so people aren't spinning their wheels trying to figure out something they really don't know much about. It's also useful in 1:1 chats to know if the person on the other side is there or not. If I don't see an indicator (or read-receipt) in the next few seconds, I'll go make another cup of coffee.

dpcan 4y ago

This is awkward. I don’t wait. In fact I try to get my comment out before anyone else when I see someone is typing. Hmm.

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago

At a place where I used to work, event systems triggered by the in-house instant messaging app were inundated with "typing status change" events. They could be filtered out, but it made me think I'd resist that feature in my instant messenger app.