Skype's role as a presencing system

I heard recently that Skype can shorten a hard drive's life span:

A more serious drawback lies in Skype's software. By accessing the hard drive multiple times per minute, the program prevents it from entering sleep or idle modes. If users do not carefully close Skype after each time they use it, the resulting heat can lead to shortened hard drive lifespan. It is not known if other VoIP applications such as Jajah also have this problem. The solution? Remember to close the Skype application after use and turn off its "open on startup" option."

One of Skype's unacknowledged features, though, is as a presencing system. That is, Skype, like other IM and chat tools, can show who else is online. It's interesting for a phone application/technology (VOIP in this case) to show presence. We're used to calling one another to find out whether a person's available, after all. The fact that we have to call is our protection from constant interruption, and it's been a critical feature of the phone. Otherwise, people have to spend too much time and effort (including psychological awareness) managing and negotiation their presence availability. Being online and visible to one person, but not to another. Being visible to one but not available, invisible to another, and available anytime to yet somebody else.
Presence is not presence availability, and the visibility of one's presence online doesn't indicate availability. Availbility, however, depends on relationship, context, and other situtational and contingent factors. Which is why the lack of relational granularity on Skype is inadequate.
The response taken by many is to quit Skype (close the application). The above information may only convince more people not to leave Skype on all the time. If enough people do this, the application's presencing function diminishes. Do we call/chat with people when they're not online? No. Might these kinds of applications be in danger of hitting a social and interpersonal threshold? The price of availability is high, and technology functions aren't equivalent to the social functions they support.

Skype, conference chats, and transactional analysis

I recently had my first experience with a skype IM conference chat. This wasn't my first group chat, but it's been a while. IRC chats were so much faster! The chat started off as a group but I had to leave early on to attend to a meeting. When the meeting was over I checked back into the chat and it practically took me several minutes to catch up. By the following day the chat had broken into several direct conversations between the conference participants, A:C, B:C, D:A, D:A:C, and so on. And I had this thought about what I saw.
Viewed by a transactional analyst, a school of interpersonal psychology that's admittedly out of style, conversation is a means by which we give each other emotional strokes. These strokes are a form of recognition and acknowledgment. We don't necessarily mean to give them, but we do, in the simple act of acknowledging a conversation partner, returning a hello, saying goodbye, etc. Strokes, in other words, don't require deep intention, but only the ritual participation in a round of interaction. TA, as the school is known, captures it in the form: I'm ok, you're ok.
Now IM, email, all mediated interaction tools that transpose "speech" into "text" perform a temporal operation also, decoupling utterance from the act of uttering and allowing participants to "speak" and to "hear" others outside the present. Not too complicated. We call them asynchronous media. IM is in fact near-synchrononous.
Assuming that we can accept the basic insight of the interpersonal psychologist, which is that emotional transactions occur behind the backs of the linguistic exchange, that is, outside of the interaction's content. And that the relation of the speaking partners is play during this exchange.
What, then, happens to the transfer of strokes over chat? It would seem that strokes are sometimes rerouted in the group instant messaging format. Because a stroke requires directly addressing another individual. And involving that individual in conversation in such a manner that s/he feels involved, and derives emotional "declaration" from the interaction. What I saw in this conference chat was a lot of "declarations" at the content level that had no particular audience, that were not addressed to another individual particularly but were addressed to the topic. Members of the chat, able to pop in and out, to review the chat's history, and then to make a contribution, tended to respond to content claims and not to emotional declarations. A round might go like this:

A: you're ok, how am I?
B: you're ok, how am I?
C: I'm ok
D: I'm ok
A: you're ok, how am I?
A: how am I?
B: you're ok
C: how am I?
D: how am I?
A: I'm ok
B: I'm ok
C: how am I?
C: how am I?
A: I'm ok
D: how am I?

...

The absence of participants from each other in located, physical space; their inability to check each others' emotional responses (face, gestures, tone and inflection, look of the eyes); their inability to negotiate turns in conversation according to how each feels in the situation: these factors force members to take another route altogether, which is, to declare how they're doing. And by declaring how we are, we fall into conversation of statements and self-reflective declarations (this is how I am; this is how I feel) that would seem to rob conversation of one of its primary social functions. Not only that, but online chat is bound to go to some emotionally stunted places if its members are all vying for visibility (more of a teen phenomenon), competing with one another for the limited attention given in a text chat.
Conversations as rounds of statements, of responses that reflect on oneself rather than taking an emotional route through the other's emotional participation, are not conversations.

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I will write more on this. For there's another angle I'd like to approach, and that is the view taken by pragmatics (Habermas) that views such transactions for their truth claims, binding, and for the effect a speech act has on its hearer. (I suspect that asynchronous communication might involve a more strategic action than communicative action.)

MySpace case study on Gravity7

Social Interaction Design Case Studies

In an attempt to flesh out the issues and approaches particular to social interaction design, I'm undertaking several case studies of popular social software systems. As each system has its particular theme (dating, social networking, career networking), feature sets, site organization, style, and other UI and user experience decisions inform member participation and produce a recognizable experience. Members know what to do because they know what the system's about. This might seem like stating the obvious, but the way in which designers can steer interactions, communication, and participation is only now finding its language.

• MySpace Case Study Draft 5 Mb One of several planned case studies in the social interaction design of social software services. The document looks at MySpace as a service designed to support a particular type of social interaction, a self-presencing system in which social scenes emerge around individuals.

Blog to mail, or blogmail

The big splash that blogging has made must be on the edge of integration with email. Blogging's popularity as a mode of expression, and email's popularity as a mode of communication are begging to unite in a grand unified platform solution that combines the specificity of addressing of email with the publishing of blogging.

• email addressing flexibility will merge with blog publishing
  
• blogging's post vs comment distinction will merge with email's existing send vs respond
  
• categorization by user definitions (e.g. in email software) will merge with popular categorization (taxonomic or tagging)
  
• privacy restrictions enabled by blogging will merge with user's social networks and address books
  
• threading offered by discussion groups and Googlemail will merge with these blogmails to offer better conversational control
  

Who's doing this?