It never worked that well in the online world, IME. People used their away status message for the equivalent of Weird Twitter; there was little incentive to pro

It never worked that well in the online world, IME. People used their away status message for the equivalent of Weird Twitter; there was little incentive to proclaim yourself "available." Likewise, there's always the person who goes "ping", "ping" at you, and then you say "what," and then they finally ask a question that you can answer in one sentence. Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.