From the time it launched in 2005 until 2012 or so when it was folded into Hangouts, I pretty much lived my life on Google Talk. The standard operating procedure when I came home from work (back then, I used to have jobs) was to open up my computer, open Google Talk and then ping 5-6 people who were online then.
The beauty of Google Talk was that you know who exactly was online at what point in time. So when you sprayed around your “hey how are you”s, you could target them at people who you knew were (or at least appeared to be) available to chat. This meant this had a high hit rate, and you could have productive conversations.
The problem with other chat mechanisms such as WhatsApp is that there is no “online” and “offline” mode. For example, if i’m working and I’m getting stuck and could use a quick conversation, turning my status to “available” on a chat room can then be a magnet for people to ping me. Or I can see which of my friends is online using their statuses, and then ping them.
With WhatsApp, I need to guess who might be available for conversation at this point in time. And that means lots of messages sent out which get responded to at the most inopportune of times (when I’ve got back my flow of work thought, for example).
In yesterday’s business standard I read about this app (whose name I now forget about ) which is trying to restart this kind of chats, signalling “availability” and chat rooms. Hopefully something like that will take off!