kortina's tumblog

What I Like About AIM Away Message / Gtalk Status

1. One message per friend: none of my active-publisher friends can drown out less active friends. I can just scroll down and see the single most recent status from each of my friends. I wish Twitter had this view
2. Because of (1), I don’t have to excercise the same amount of restraint when I publish. On Tumblr and Twitter, I try to space out posts because I think if someone sees 3 posts in a row by me they are more likely to skip over. On chat, there’s only ever one status for me, so I don’t have to excercise this restraint.
3. Private, closer connections: laserlike recently noted that possibly your tightest social graph on the web is your chat list. You’re very likely to prune this list to avoid interruptions from distant connections. Hence, publishing here hits a very targeted audience. I’ve noticed a great response rate when I post to Gtalk status, and need to measure this with a campaign segmentation test vs Facebook and Twitter.
4. Private, not indexed: sometimes you want to share stuff without having Google index it—eg, personal notes for close friends and family.

Kind of makes me want to whip up a quick app-engine / connect application that is a now-only, one post per person at any given moment status list. You could layer on all your graphs from Facebook, Twitter, etc, and choose to import your statuses from there or publish directly, but we’d only store one post per person at any given time.  Zero bandwidth for this right now, but maybe a good project for the BBQ next month.