Daniel Pallett

You often have many contacts on an instant messaging network, whether it be MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, Skype or whatever. Well it’s a basic fact that us humans tend to have certain friends who we’d rather talk to than others. There is a hierarchy if you like. Your closest family and friends - who you’d always talk to. Then people who you are happy to talk to most of the time. Then other people who you rarely talk to, etc.

I’ve found it is often the case that you block a fair number of contacts or change your presence to away, busy or even invisible. And all this to avoid the chance that someone who’s online, that you really can’t be bothered to talk to, IMs you. Quite possibly doing this whilst chatting as normal to other contacts.

It struck me that it’s quite a bit of hassle blocking/unblocking and changing your status. So I had a thought. Have levels of visibility. You assign a contact a certain level number. Then you set your current level. You will be visible to people at or above the set level, but contacts below that level will not see you online. For example, level 1 is the highest level. If your level is set to 2 then contacts in levels 1 and 2 will see you online, but contacts in lower levels will not see you.

You may not feel it would be more convenient or user-friendly, but it is a different angle of looking at the online presence model. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 19:40. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.