Buddy list begone

Ah, the buddy list. Remember when we actually liked advertising to our friends that we were online, and maybe even wanted to chat? That was high-tech — in 1995. The buddy list (also known as presence) is a kind of social transparency, and while we still need social transparency mechanisms built in to our communications media, presence is no longer the appropriate mechanism. Presence comes from a time when the normal state of affairs was that you were unavailable, usually because in order to be available, you had to be at a desktop computer with a modem, and had to dial in to your ISP. Available meant connected, and connected meant available. When always-on connections were still novel, the away message became all the rage. (Remember when, in undergrad, we would regularly leave our computers on all night as an answering machine?) And presence became more sophisticated, using not just away messages, but idle states and times. But in many cases, just being visible on a buddy list is too much presence.

At the other end of the spectrum, historically speaking, was SMS. Being mobile, it was assumed that one was always connected (and therefore available) via SMS; therefore, presence was unnecessary. Yet people aren’t (or at least don’t want to be) always available.

Now that the nominal assumption is one of connectedness, connectedness and availability can no longer be assumed to be the same. And because connectedness is the assumed state, it doesn’t need to be advertised.

This, it seems to me, sets the historical context for a new (except for BBM) trend displacing presence: notifications of engagement. Rather than explicitly articulated status, action (or inaction) by the receiver signal availability to the sender. They do away with status, but provide the social transparency needed to manage sender expectations. Or, more simply, the sender can see whether their message has been received and read.

While right now this is almost exclusively used in mobile-to-mobile systems (BBM, Kik, Whatsapp, etc.), it has always bothered me that there is no desktop client for any of these systems. Finally, Apple — who pioneered FaceTime’s always-available-no-presence-like-a-telephone availability — is poised to bring such a system to the desktop (as well as iOS) with iMessage^[1]. It’s instant messaging, without presence, with delivery, read, and typing notifications, that works on the desktop and mobile devices.

Personally, I can’t wait.