11 ms·

It's time to bring back the AIM away message

185 points by fortran77 4y ago

warpkid 4y ago
Worth noting that Apple introduced Focus in the last version of iOS that added custom behaviours around this. If you message someone who is using a 'work' profile for example and have decided to ignore messages, the messaging user will be informed before they send the message that you have notifications disabled. This information is also available to developers, so other chat apps could let messaging users know that a user is 'away' for example. I quite like the idea of having an 'away' profile that I can set that is automatically mirrored across all my devices and all the third party apps I use honour the setting and make use of it, so anyone trying to contact me is told that I am away and won't reply. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682143 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682143
- Terretta 4y ago
  Focus is quite robust. 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.
tiffanyh 4y ago
What I liked about AIM was that it was predominately only 1:1 chat (high signal-to-noise ratio). 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.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  This is a really fantastic point, especially considering Slack lets you just get pulled in to something without accepting the invite or consenting to join. I prefer properly run chat channels over DMs (knowledge silos are bad), but the fact that Slack would let someone create a room, invite you to it, and start `@channel` blasting at any time is wild. At least we get the ability to snooze notifications based on time, I guess.
  - flatiron 4y ago
    You can mute channels too. I have a ton of “ask” slack channels for the various things I’m considered a SME on that I simply mute. If I have a free minute I’ll drop in and share some stuff but I can’t be answering those things all the time.
    - deckard1 4y ago
      mute sucks. It still puts the channel on the bottom and I'm the type of OCD idiot that gets annoyed by any unread messages. I really really really want /ignore. Because often I need to be in a channel but the powers that be add lots of spam bots to the channel in a misguided attempt at being "helpful". My morning struggle is opening Slack and clearing out dozens of bot messages across dozens of channels. I just want to banish these bots to /dev/null. Permanently. They provide zero value to me or, dare I say, anyone else. But the people that assume a daily flood of garbage information = more productivity have won the war.
EddieDante 4y ago
I'd rather we taught people not to start a messaging/slack/teams/whatsapp/etc session with "hello". Don't say "hello" and then make people wait for however long it takes for you to type whatever it was you really wanted to say. This isn't a telephone. Stop trying to use async comms as if they were synchronous. It's rude and annoying. https://www.nohello.com/ https://www.nohello.com/
- Melatonic 4y ago
  I find this trends pretty well across generations - young people are rarely starting with "hello". I suspect people above a certain age just find doing it that way more polite
littleweep 4y ago
IIRC that was the original intention of Twitter -- in the beginning the prompt was "What are you doing?" and you were supposed to update with something like "Out for a hike" and not so much hot takes on politics.
pazimzadeh 4y ago
I would like a physical version of the status message. An e-ink or other low res display with up to 160 char, connected to the internet, which I can place on my desk and can update from my phone to let my co-workers know where I am. Does something like this already exist?
- jmrm 4y ago
  To be honest, this is a nice project to do with an RPi/ESP32, a eInk display, and a Telegram bot :-)
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    Yeah, or actually maybe just an old iPhone
- michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  There was an interesting startup from a few years back that would basically issue everybody in your company a dedicated android tablet on a stand that shipped with a customized collaboration software. I'm not sure I'd like to use it myself, but it had some interesting UX ideas around always on video (but blurred out and audio muted) so you and your team were more "present". I can't find it now, but a part of it was a better away message setup for the same reasons.
- wildzzz 4y ago
  In the past, I had a small whiteboard on my door I could write my away messages on (lunch, meeting, vacation, etc) and people could leave short replies on it when they didn't want to send an email (call me, borrowed your charger. It worked great but only really works when you work in an office all day and can update it when you get back from wherever you went.
jjuel 4y ago
I just want the door open/door close sounds back to know when my contacts are on or off line ;)
dwighttk 4y ago
Kinda funny, when I first started using Twitter I thought of it as an elevated AIM away message.
dasil003 4y ago
You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more recent friends. In that environment synchronous chat was fun and novel. Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.
charles_f 4y ago
Interesting, I think I see WhatsApp, signal et al more like email than AIM. I've never felt the pressure to stay engaged in conversation or to answer right away, if at all.
spicy_tendies 4y ago
How could they have a discussion on asynchronous vs synchronous text-based communication without mentioning Discord? Discord is the closest modern day equivalent to AIM.
egypturnash 4y ago
It was so much easier when there was one program where all your chats lived, and where this program was only on one device. This article made me decide to shut up a lot of notifications. So I got to pick up the iPhone and both of the iPads, scroll through a lengthy list of every app on all three of those devices that's ever requested the power of sending a notification, find the apps people talk to me on, and turn off their ability to make a popup and a noise happen. And then I get to do it again on the computer I'm typing this on. Except there it's a mishmash of individual program's settings and stuff in the "notifications" section of OSX's preferences. It looks like I was a lot more aggressive in making stuff not notify me on the the computer so there's not much to turn off. I really miss the days when all my chatting happened via Adium. One program. On one device.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  It was Trillian for me - one program and a ton of protocols. It was also a pain to setup though and often had to be updated as shit changed. If you take the time to really customize your notifications you can make them pretty powerful - I have a huge system of color coded emails in both my personal and work email and only get notifications on my mobile device for the ones I find important. It takes up a good amount of time to initially setup all of these filters and whatnot but after the fact it is totally worth it. I spent about one full work day on each (work and personal) and occasionally tune it after that (only a few minutes). I wish I had done it sooner. For those that really get annoyed by constant dings you can also do what my friend did - he turned on do not disturb (DnD) all the time. He then turned on the function where if someone calls back twice in a row they will blow past the DnD. And then added specific close people to the list of exceptions. At the time I thought this was a bit crazy but now I use a similar system at night when sleeping and sometimes when on vacation and it works surprisingly well.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    mail(1), talk(1), and write(1), back in the day.
imchillyb 4y ago
"uh-OH!"
- dopeboy 4y ago
  I believe that’s ICQ :)
RajT88 4y ago
While I agree with the overall thesis: > 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"
Aloha 4y ago
I never used away messages on AIM - I'd just sign offline (AIM for the longest time didn't support offline messages) what I miss is being away conceptually. I remember the time before everyone had cell phones, when I might be out all day (as a late teen, and a little older - I didn't get a mobile phone until 20), and I'd have a couple bucks in quarters if I needed to phone home (or anyone) and had my important phone numbers memorized. I also had a pager for a while, so if someone really needed me, they could page me, and I could call them back when I was near a phone. When I was driving, I was away, on my bike? away, out for a walk? away - while I could check in with people if needed, I wasn't constantly reachable. Now there are half a dozen ways anyone can reach me, at any time, and for a variety of cultural reasons, if I'm offline for more than a couple hours - I have people who will be concerned.
w-ll 4y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing. https://awaymsg.io/ https://awaymsg.io/ with a shorter link for sharing https://amsg.io/wartron https://amsg.io/wartron. Right now its more of a "Link In Bio" type side, but to make that less strict, and more of a tiny site.
themadturk 4y ago
I remember a law firm I worked for where a few people (secretaries and paralogals) were using AIM for workplace IM. I'm not sure what else was commercially available the time (sometime between 1996 and 2006), but it was AIM was a handy thing, just as Skype/Zoom/Mattermost (and others my employer doesn't use yet) are today.
fortran77 4y ago
Twitter and other "microblogging" sites used to be ways to share something akin to your "away" status. You'd post what you're busy doing now. "Reuven is eating lunch" or "Reuven is driving to Ojai."
- dopeboy 4y ago
  I didn’t start using Twitter until 2013. Is this true? People even tweeted these kind of statuses?
schrodinger 4y ago
"Obviously doing something more important than you" was my go-to AIM away message :)
s0rce 4y ago
I think you can have away messages on MS Teams, you can have away status. I find it tedious to constantly update. Usually I just rely on the auto-status based on my calendar.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I dislike that teams auto-aways during Outlook-defined working hours. I want it to stay green, or red, or do-not-disturb at my leisure, regardless whether I'm focused on the browser window it is open in.
  - alar44 4y ago
    That's controlled by your admin. Ask them about it, I don't have that set up in our implementation.
  - Jaruzel 4y ago
    Install the teams desktop app. That uses the machines idle check to trigger the away status, so if you are active but not in teams, it'll stay green or red. Oh and also Google 'MouseJiggler'.
teeray 4y ago
I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text. Once you were off AIM, you were off. SMS/iMessage/etc. are an open-ended conversation that spans hours or days with ambiguous expectations of responsiveness. In the past you were unequivocally sitting at your computer, looking to chat. Now you could be out working in the yard, running errands, trying to watch a movie, or generally doing something in real life that is interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends.
- JamesAdir 4y ago
  It was the same with ICQ. You could sent messages when someone was offline or away but it didn't showed up on their screens until they've switch to an Online status. It was much more useful and productive than today constant chatter.
- baisq 4y ago
  I hate the opposite: I can't know when someone is free and ready to chat with me. I may send a message and wait 30 seconds or 3 hours until I can get a conversation going. Or get responses every 20 minutes instead of every 2 minutes.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    In my experience the issue isn't usually friends. It's people you have to stay in contact with like family, or maybe coworkers, and they don't understand what asynchronous communication is and have unrealistic expectations that now that you have an alway-on device, you will be ready to respond to it immediately. If you don't have that in your life, you are lucky.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
notjustanymike 4y ago
I cannot recommend enough cultivating a reputation for being grumpy but fair. Try and make approaching you like a game of Dark Souls; rewarding if the player is prepared. People will respect your time and accept death as the penalty for failure.
- stingta 4y ago
  Yep, I am contactable via irc (w/ flakey bitlbee) or xmpp, if you message me, I'll reply but I'm very much not always online. Call if its an emergency, and its probably not really am emergency for me if you don't have my number
- Zircom 4y ago
  My general rule about communicating that I tell people about is that if you want/need a response call me, otherwise I have no guarantee I'll remember to reply or text you back.
- NateEag 4y ago
  This reminds me of Hamming's "You And Your Research" speech, specifically what he said about open vs closed doors: "If you work with the door closed, you won't be interrupted - you get your work done. You work with your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on, so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on. They are not connected with reality. Those who have the door open may very well know what's important. I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door. I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular. Almost always the guys with the door closed were often very well able, very gifted but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
  - AndrewOMartin 4y ago
    It sounds like what we need is some kind of door which can efficiently and reversibly toggle its openness depending on circumstance.
fma 4y ago
Phones have a sort of "driving mode" that would auto respond when you are driving...just hijack that feature.
synu 4y ago
There’s something to say for not having them - I’m not at my computer, and don’t really need to explain to anyone why that’s the case.
throwaway892238 4y ago
Remember that back in the day your computer was not online 24/7/365. Away messages were really useful, because without them someone would have to literally sit at their chat window when you were online and wait for you to respond. If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all. I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message. This completed the functionality we all needed: just make sure my message gets to the person eventually. I don't think we want to bring back that experience. Facebook and WhatsApp and other messengers already give the ability to send a message when someone is offline, as well as letting you have a live interaction when online. All someone needs to do is set themselves as 'offline' and they can still get messages without having to respond. I think this is the right balance. The away message only makes sense if you want to be online and simultaneously tell people you aren't responding. Well, if you're not responding, why not just set yourself as offline? However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
- amelius 4y ago
  > "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again. I'd like to allow people to contact me when I'm on a holiday, but it should take them some effort. Like "You can contact me, but first solve this puzzle".
- cupofpython 4y ago
  >If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all. This was a feature. email already existed. phone calls already existed. AIM provided new information about a persons availability in that they were currently online and open to communications. If I didnt want to talk to people, I could not sign on to aim. Respecting peoples personal space was a default. Now it is ambiguous. Does this person want to talk right now? They are online, but that means absolutely nothing now.
throwaway8grf7 4y ago
They can also go too far in the other direction... Cow-orker in other department always leaves their ${company internal IM client} status as "Away" because they are 'tired of those marketing ppl always bugging them'. This, of course, misleads everyone else in the company, not knowing if they are even working that day. Sometimes they change it to "Away - Here, but working" which I guess deters only the ppl that look at the colored dot, not the text. This is exactly what the DND (different color) is for, but they cannot seem to comprehend that either, even after an explanation. Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  They? So, this is a widespread phenomenon?
- slingnow 4y ago
  > Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works. We must have very different definitions of the word "catastrophic" ...
- Melatonic 4y ago
  During the peak of the original lockdowns I liked setting my "away" message to something comedic - the trend caught on with a few people I worked with. This was inspired by an email signature I saw years ago from a coworker who is a super successful writer for a well known comedic TV show - it was a riff on the standard iOS email signature - instead hers said at the very end of every email: "Sent from YOUR iPhone!"
- nwiswell 4y ago
  > 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.
- tobtoh 4y ago
  I did that - my IM client was on permanent 'away' status. I was tired of being 'green' and people would send multiple messages if I didn't respond instantly to their IMs. Being permanently 'away' meant people could still contact me and I could respond when convenient without disrupting my work. I very much subscribe to the convention that proximity should determine how much communication should interrupt what you are doing. Face to Face > Phone/video Call > IM > Email
stolenmerch 4y ago
I might be too Gen X for this but I'm a firm believer in just cultivating a messaging etiquette with the people I know and not outsourcing it to a status message. My boomer family knows they can always contact me via text and chat and my millenial/zoomer family knows I'm often away from my phone hours at a time. It seems pretty manageable, honestly.
- helij 4y ago
  Same here. I have all notifications turned off on my phone. Friends know that I only check Whatsup twice a week. Text or call and I'll usually see it within two hours. I don't really understand people who complain about these things. I guess we are wired differently. Whenever I check Whatsup I realise I didn't miss anything at all. At work we have Slack and I made it clear that I might not be able to answer for hours. Use email and I'll decide if it's important and if so will answer within an hour or leave it for another day. I also insist that everything client/work related is in an email. If it's on Slack only then it doesn't exist.
- alar44 4y ago
  Yeah this is a boundary issue, not a "there is too much connection" in the world problem. I don't use any DND or away messaging. I answer when I choose to answer. I don't really get the issue.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    100% this. Most people are cool with the rules I set down for messaging me. Basically "i will get back to you but not necessarily right away". However, some people seem to expect that you usually have your phone on you and they sent you a message you better respond ASAP no mater what. They can not comprehend that I have effectively turned my notification tones off (light buzz). I get too many messages to have that be useful anymore and I am not constantly fiddling with my phone...
- astrange 4y ago
  This makes it sound like you intentionally ignore the younger people in your family.
hunter2_ 4y ago
As has been said but not discussed much, the real difference with AIM was showing an error to the potential sender when they start to compose a message. User is offline, user is away. The latter is similar to presence indicators today (you can still send for eventual receipt), but the former is absent today (no major platform denies the ability to send for reasons of an offline recipient; they store it for later). Totally absent. Could it ever return? The closest thing I can think of is when you disable voicemail and turn off your phone (callers are given an error message to try later) but how do we get this error in front of people messaging, while attempting to compose?
EGreg 4y ago
Real time chat is an antipattern. It is mostly a gimmick by cloud providers to get people addicted to their service. People should be contributing to structured, threaded conversations.
- digitalsushi 4y ago
  I am incredulous about all but your final statement.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Why ?
twobitshifter 4y ago
There’s a way to do those with email. It’s usually called an out of office or automatic reply. In exchange it will show up before you send the email. of course, people only use this when they are on leave, but that’s just email culture.
lukasb 4y ago
Yes. There are times that I'm away from computers for a month or more, would be very helpful to be able to auto-reply on FB Messenger, iMessage etc to let people know I'm not ignoring them.
emersion 4y ago
FWIW, IRC still has away messages. And quit/part messages.
guerrilla 4y ago
Oh yeah, I loved that, also the ability to seem like you were always offline or always online. I miss that kind of privacy and control.
JetAlone 4y ago
I never used AIM, but this is unmistakably a feature I want.
samwillis 4y ago
This comes down to having distinct synchronous and asynchronous communication platforms. Back in the day you has email for async and aol/msn/icq for sync. On top of that they were only on your computer, and most people had desktops, you had to physically be at your computer to use them. The joy of sitting there chatting away with friends while doing homework or playing games was brilliant. On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up. Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text. Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that. (I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)
codingdave 4y ago
I find it inflexible to acknowledge that Slack has status messaging, but then reject it just because it isn't what you grew up with. Their main reason for rejecting it is that people can still send you messages. OK, fine - Just ignore them. Minimize Slack, or shut it off, and go about your day. Check back in later to catch up on things. After all, you don't answer your phone every time it rings, you don't reply to email every time, so why do people let themselves be driven by Slack messages? The problem here is your team's messaging culture, not the tech.
- claviska 4y ago
  The author mentions: > 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.
  - inanutshellus 4y ago
    Similar to the "you didn't answer the phone, so now I'm worried you're dead / know you're ignoring me" scenario we have today in which 100% reachability means if you don't answer the phone, there's a reason. The surreal world of "hey kids, go play all day. Come back before dark!" is unfathomable. We literally leash children that are too small to be reached digitally. Fascinating societal change in a fairly short amount of time.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      The only people I know that think "you didn't answer the phone, so now I'm worried you're dead" are my elderly relatives. In my experience, tech natives are on board with the idea of responding in your own time and insulating yourself from always-on communication.
qwerty456127 4y ago
It should be possible to specify priority when sending: extreme urgency / normal / nevermind. Urgent should always generate full notification with sound, blink and pop-up, low-priority should never generate any kind of notification.
100xdang 4y ago

185 points by fortran77 4y ago

Worth noting that Apple introduced Focus in the last version of iOS that added custom behaviours around this. If you message someone who is using a 'work' profile for example and have decided to ignore messages, the messaging user will be informed before they send the message that you have notifications disabled. This information is also available to developers, so other chat apps could let messaging users know that a user is 'away' for example. I quite like the idea of having an 'away' profile that I can set that is automatically mirrored across all my devices and all the third party apps I use honour the setting and make use of it, so anyone trying to contact me is told that I am away and won't reply. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682143 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682143

Terretta 4y ago
Focus is quite robust. 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.

tiffanyh 4y ago

What I liked about AIM was that it was predominately only 1:1 chat (high signal-to-noise ratio). 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.

eddieroger 4y ago
This is a really fantastic point, especially considering Slack lets you just get pulled in to something without accepting the invite or consenting to join. I prefer properly run chat channels over DMs (knowledge silos are bad), but the fact that Slack would let someone create a room, invite you to it, and start `@channel` blasting at any time is wild. At least we get the ability to snooze notifications based on time, I guess.
- flatiron 4y ago
  You can mute channels too. I have a ton of “ask” slack channels for the various things I’m considered a SME on that I simply mute. If I have a free minute I’ll drop in and share some stuff but I can’t be answering those things all the time.
  - deckard1 4y ago
    mute sucks. It still puts the channel on the bottom and I'm the type of OCD idiot that gets annoyed by any unread messages. I really really really want /ignore. Because often I need to be in a channel but the powers that be add lots of spam bots to the channel in a misguided attempt at being "helpful". My morning struggle is opening Slack and clearing out dozens of bot messages across dozens of channels. I just want to banish these bots to /dev/null. Permanently. They provide zero value to me or, dare I say, anyone else. But the people that assume a daily flood of garbage information = more productivity have won the war.

EddieDante 4y ago

I'd rather we taught people not to start a messaging/slack/teams/whatsapp/etc session with "hello". Don't say "hello" and then make people wait for however long it takes for you to type whatever it was you really wanted to say. This isn't a telephone. Stop trying to use async comms as if they were synchronous. It's rude and annoying. https://www.nohello.com/ https://www.nohello.com/

Melatonic 4y ago
I find this trends pretty well across generations - young people are rarely starting with "hello". I suspect people above a certain age just find doing it that way more polite

littleweep 4y ago

IIRC that was the original intention of Twitter -- in the beginning the prompt was "What are you doing?" and you were supposed to update with something like "Out for a hike" and not so much hot takes on politics.

pazimzadeh 4y ago

I would like a physical version of the status message. An e-ink or other low res display with up to 160 char, connected to the internet, which I can place on my desk and can update from my phone to let my co-workers know where I am. Does something like this already exist?

jmrm 4y ago
To be honest, this is a nice project to do with an RPi/ESP32, a eInk display, and a Telegram bot :-)
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  Yeah, or actually maybe just an old iPhone
michaelbuckbee 4y ago
There was an interesting startup from a few years back that would basically issue everybody in your company a dedicated android tablet on a stand that shipped with a customized collaboration software. I'm not sure I'd like to use it myself, but it had some interesting UX ideas around always on video (but blurred out and audio muted) so you and your team were more "present". I can't find it now, but a part of it was a better away message setup for the same reasons.
wildzzz 4y ago
In the past, I had a small whiteboard on my door I could write my away messages on (lunch, meeting, vacation, etc) and people could leave short replies on it when they didn't want to send an email (call me, borrowed your charger. It worked great but only really works when you work in an office all day and can update it when you get back from wherever you went.

jjuel 4y ago

I just want the door open/door close sounds back to know when my contacts are on or off line ;)

dwighttk 4y ago

Kinda funny, when I first started using Twitter I thought of it as an elevated AIM away message.

dasil003 4y ago

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more recent friends. In that environment synchronous chat was fun and novel. Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.

charles_f 4y ago

Interesting, I think I see WhatsApp, signal et al more like email than AIM. I've never felt the pressure to stay engaged in conversation or to answer right away, if at all.

spicy_tendies 4y ago

How could they have a discussion on asynchronous vs synchronous text-based communication without mentioning Discord? Discord is the closest modern day equivalent to AIM.

egypturnash 4y ago

It was so much easier when there was one program where all your chats lived, and where this program was only on one device. This article made me decide to shut up a lot of notifications. So I got to pick up the iPhone and both of the iPads, scroll through a lengthy list of every app on all three of those devices that's ever requested the power of sending a notification, find the apps people talk to me on, and turn off their ability to make a popup and a noise happen. And then I get to do it again on the computer I'm typing this on. Except there it's a mishmash of individual program's settings and stuff in the "notifications" section of OSX's preferences. It looks like I was a lot more aggressive in making stuff not notify me on the the computer so there's not much to turn off. I really miss the days when all my chatting happened via Adium. One program. On one device.

Melatonic 4y ago
It was Trillian for me - one program and a ton of protocols. It was also a pain to setup though and often had to be updated as shit changed. If you take the time to really customize your notifications you can make them pretty powerful - I have a huge system of color coded emails in both my personal and work email and only get notifications on my mobile device for the ones I find important. It takes up a good amount of time to initially setup all of these filters and whatnot but after the fact it is totally worth it. I spent about one full work day on each (work and personal) and occasionally tune it after that (only a few minutes). I wish I had done it sooner. For those that really get annoyed by constant dings you can also do what my friend did - he turned on do not disturb (DnD) all the time. He then turned on the function where if someone calls back twice in a row they will blow past the DnD. And then added specific close people to the list of exceptions. At the time I thought this was a bit crazy but now I use a similar system at night when sleeping and sometimes when on vacation and it works surprisingly well.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  mail(1), talk(1), and write(1), back in the day.

imchillyb 4y ago

"uh-OH!"

dopeboy 4y ago
I believe that’s ICQ :)

RajT88 4y ago

While I agree with the overall thesis: > 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"

Aloha 4y ago

I never used away messages on AIM - I'd just sign offline (AIM for the longest time didn't support offline messages) what I miss is being away conceptually. I remember the time before everyone had cell phones, when I might be out all day (as a late teen, and a little older - I didn't get a mobile phone until 20), and I'd have a couple bucks in quarters if I needed to phone home (or anyone) and had my important phone numbers memorized. I also had a pager for a while, so if someone really needed me, they could page me, and I could call them back when I was near a phone. When I was driving, I was away, on my bike? away, out for a walk? away - while I could check in with people if needed, I wasn't constantly reachable. Now there are half a dozen ways anyone can reach me, at any time, and for a variety of cultural reasons, if I'm offline for more than a couple hours - I have people who will be concerned.

w-ll 4y ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. https://awaymsg.io/ https://awaymsg.io/ with a shorter link for sharing https://amsg.io/wartron https://amsg.io/wartron. Right now its more of a "Link In Bio" type side, but to make that less strict, and more of a tiny site.

themadturk 4y ago

I remember a law firm I worked for where a few people (secretaries and paralogals) were using AIM for workplace IM. I'm not sure what else was commercially available the time (sometime between 1996 and 2006), but it was AIM was a handy thing, just as Skype/Zoom/Mattermost (and others my employer doesn't use yet) are today.

fortran77 4y ago

Twitter and other "microblogging" sites used to be ways to share something akin to your "away" status. You'd post what you're busy doing now. "Reuven is eating lunch" or "Reuven is driving to Ojai."

dopeboy 4y ago
I didn’t start using Twitter until 2013. Is this true? People even tweeted these kind of statuses?

schrodinger 4y ago

"Obviously doing something more important than you" was my go-to AIM away message :)

s0rce 4y ago

I think you can have away messages on MS Teams, you can have away status. I find it tedious to constantly update. Usually I just rely on the auto-status based on my calendar.

tomrod 4y ago
I dislike that teams auto-aways during Outlook-defined working hours. I want it to stay green, or red, or do-not-disturb at my leisure, regardless whether I'm focused on the browser window it is open in.
- alar44 4y ago
  That's controlled by your admin. Ask them about it, I don't have that set up in our implementation.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Install the teams desktop app. That uses the machines idle check to trigger the away status, so if you are active but not in teams, it'll stay green or red. Oh and also Google 'MouseJiggler'.

teeray 4y ago

I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text. Once you were off AIM, you were off. SMS/iMessage/etc. are an open-ended conversation that spans hours or days with ambiguous expectations of responsiveness. In the past you were unequivocally sitting at your computer, looking to chat. Now you could be out working in the yard, running errands, trying to watch a movie, or generally doing something in real life that is interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends.

JamesAdir 4y ago
It was the same with ICQ. You could sent messages when someone was offline or away but it didn't showed up on their screens until they've switch to an Online status. It was much more useful and productive than today constant chatter.
baisq 4y ago
I hate the opposite: I can't know when someone is free and ready to chat with me. I may send a message and wait 30 seconds or 3 hours until I can get a conversation going. Or get responses every 20 minutes instead of every 2 minutes.
dfxm12 4y ago
interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  In my experience the issue isn't usually friends. It's people you have to stay in contact with like family, or maybe coworkers, and they don't understand what asynchronous communication is and have unrealistic expectations that now that you have an alway-on device, you will be ready to respond to it immediately. If you don't have that in your life, you are lucky.
GeekyBear 4y ago

notjustanymike 4y ago

I cannot recommend enough cultivating a reputation for being grumpy but fair. Try and make approaching you like a game of Dark Souls; rewarding if the player is prepared. People will respect your time and accept death as the penalty for failure.

stingta 4y ago
Yep, I am contactable via irc (w/ flakey bitlbee) or xmpp, if you message me, I'll reply but I'm very much not always online. Call if its an emergency, and its probably not really am emergency for me if you don't have my number
Zircom 4y ago
My general rule about communicating that I tell people about is that if you want/need a response call me, otherwise I have no guarantee I'll remember to reply or text you back.
NateEag 4y ago
This reminds me of Hamming's "You And Your Research" speech, specifically what he said about open vs closed doors: "If you work with the door closed, you won't be interrupted - you get your work done. You work with your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on, so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on. They are not connected with reality. Those who have the door open may very well know what's important. I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door. I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular. Almost always the guys with the door closed were often very well able, very gifted but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
- AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  It sounds like what we need is some kind of door which can efficiently and reversibly toggle its openness depending on circumstance.

fma 4y ago

Phones have a sort of "driving mode" that would auto respond when you are driving...just hijack that feature.

synu 4y ago

There’s something to say for not having them - I’m not at my computer, and don’t really need to explain to anyone why that’s the case.

throwaway892238 4y ago

Remember that back in the day your computer was not online 24/7/365. Away messages were really useful, because without them someone would have to literally sit at their chat window when you were online and wait for you to respond. If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all. I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message. This completed the functionality we all needed: just make sure my message gets to the person eventually. I don't think we want to bring back that experience. Facebook and WhatsApp and other messengers already give the ability to send a message when someone is offline, as well as letting you have a live interaction when online. All someone needs to do is set themselves as 'offline' and they can still get messages without having to respond. I think this is the right balance. The away message only makes sense if you want to be online and simultaneously tell people you aren't responding. Well, if you're not responding, why not just set yourself as offline? However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.

amelius 4y ago
> "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again. I'd like to allow people to contact me when I'm on a holiday, but it should take them some effort. Like "You can contact me, but first solve this puzzle".
cupofpython 4y ago
>If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all. This was a feature. email already existed. phone calls already existed. AIM provided new information about a persons availability in that they were currently online and open to communications. If I didnt want to talk to people, I could not sign on to aim. Respecting peoples personal space was a default. Now it is ambiguous. Does this person want to talk right now? They are online, but that means absolutely nothing now.

throwaway8grf7 4y ago

They can also go too far in the other direction... Cow-orker in other department always leaves their ${company internal IM client} status as "Away" because they are 'tired of those marketing ppl always bugging them'. This, of course, misleads everyone else in the company, not knowing if they are even working that day. Sometimes they change it to "Away - Here, but working" which I guess deters only the ppl that look at the colored dot, not the text. This is exactly what the DND (different color) is for, but they cannot seem to comprehend that either, even after an explanation. Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.

elzbardico 4y ago
They? So, this is a widespread phenomenon?
slingnow 4y ago
> Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works. We must have very different definitions of the word "catastrophic" ...
Melatonic 4y ago
During the peak of the original lockdowns I liked setting my "away" message to something comedic - the trend caught on with a few people I worked with. This was inspired by an email signature I saw years ago from a coworker who is a super successful writer for a well known comedic TV show - it was a riff on the standard iOS email signature - instead hers said at the very end of every email: "Sent from YOUR iPhone!"
nwiswell 4y ago
> 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.
tobtoh 4y ago
I did that - my IM client was on permanent 'away' status. I was tired of being 'green' and people would send multiple messages if I didn't respond instantly to their IMs. Being permanently 'away' meant people could still contact me and I could respond when convenient without disrupting my work. I very much subscribe to the convention that proximity should determine how much communication should interrupt what you are doing. Face to Face > Phone/video Call > IM > Email

stolenmerch 4y ago

I might be too Gen X for this but I'm a firm believer in just cultivating a messaging etiquette with the people I know and not outsourcing it to a status message. My boomer family knows they can always contact me via text and chat and my millenial/zoomer family knows I'm often away from my phone hours at a time. It seems pretty manageable, honestly.

helij 4y ago
Same here. I have all notifications turned off on my phone. Friends know that I only check Whatsup twice a week. Text or call and I'll usually see it within two hours. I don't really understand people who complain about these things. I guess we are wired differently. Whenever I check Whatsup I realise I didn't miss anything at all. At work we have Slack and I made it clear that I might not be able to answer for hours. Use email and I'll decide if it's important and if so will answer within an hour or leave it for another day. I also insist that everything client/work related is in an email. If it's on Slack only then it doesn't exist.
alar44 4y ago
Yeah this is a boundary issue, not a "there is too much connection" in the world problem. I don't use any DND or away messaging. I answer when I choose to answer. I don't really get the issue.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  100% this. Most people are cool with the rules I set down for messaging me. Basically "i will get back to you but not necessarily right away". However, some people seem to expect that you usually have your phone on you and they sent you a message you better respond ASAP no mater what. They can not comprehend that I have effectively turned my notification tones off (light buzz). I get too many messages to have that be useful anymore and I am not constantly fiddling with my phone...
astrange 4y ago
This makes it sound like you intentionally ignore the younger people in your family.

hunter2_ 4y ago

As has been said but not discussed much, the real difference with AIM was showing an error to the potential sender when they start to compose a message. User is offline, user is away. The latter is similar to presence indicators today (you can still send for eventual receipt), but the former is absent today (no major platform denies the ability to send for reasons of an offline recipient; they store it for later). Totally absent. Could it ever return? The closest thing I can think of is when you disable voicemail and turn off your phone (callers are given an error message to try later) but how do we get this error in front of people messaging, while attempting to compose?

EGreg 4y ago

Real time chat is an antipattern. It is mostly a gimmick by cloud providers to get people addicted to their service. People should be contributing to structured, threaded conversations.

digitalsushi 4y ago
I am incredulous about all but your final statement.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Why ?

twobitshifter 4y ago

There’s a way to do those with email. It’s usually called an out of office or automatic reply. In exchange it will show up before you send the email. of course, people only use this when they are on leave, but that’s just email culture.

lukasb 4y ago

Yes. There are times that I'm away from computers for a month or more, would be very helpful to be able to auto-reply on FB Messenger, iMessage etc to let people know I'm not ignoring them.

emersion 4y ago

FWIW, IRC still has away messages. And quit/part messages.

guerrilla 4y ago

Oh yeah, I loved that, also the ability to seem like you were always offline or always online. I miss that kind of privacy and control.

JetAlone 4y ago

I never used AIM, but this is unmistakably a feature I want.

samwillis 4y ago

This comes down to having distinct synchronous and asynchronous communication platforms. Back in the day you has email for async and aol/msn/icq for sync. On top of that they were only on your computer, and most people had desktops, you had to physically be at your computer to use them. The joy of sitting there chatting away with friends while doing homework or playing games was brilliant. On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up. Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text. Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that. (I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)

codingdave 4y ago

I find it inflexible to acknowledge that Slack has status messaging, but then reject it just because it isn't what you grew up with. Their main reason for rejecting it is that people can still send you messages. OK, fine - Just ignore them. Minimize Slack, or shut it off, and go about your day. Check back in later to catch up on things. After all, you don't answer your phone every time it rings, you don't reply to email every time, so why do people let themselves be driven by Slack messages? The problem here is your team's messaging culture, not the tech.

claviska 4y ago
The author mentions: > 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.
- inanutshellus 4y ago
  Similar to the "you didn't answer the phone, so now I'm worried you're dead / know you're ignoring me" scenario we have today in which 100% reachability means if you don't answer the phone, there's a reason. The surreal world of "hey kids, go play all day. Come back before dark!" is unfathomable. We literally leash children that are too small to be reached digitally. Fascinating societal change in a fairly short amount of time.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The only people I know that think "you didn't answer the phone, so now I'm worried you're dead" are my elderly relatives. In my experience, tech natives are on board with the idea of responding in your own time and insulating yourself from always-on communication.

qwerty456127 4y ago

It should be possible to specify priority when sending: extreme urgency / normal / nevermind. Urgent should always generate full notification with sound, blink and pop-up, low-priority should never generate any kind of notification.

100xdang 4y ago