Skypographical Error
Why do people keep IMing me to ask if they can Skype me? After all, no one SMSes me to ask if they can call me on my cell.
To me this is all wound up in issues of offline vs. online etiquette. It’s pretty well-accepted that if you call someone on their mobile phone and they don’t want to take the call, they can refuse without being overly rude. In fact, it’s usually unclear whether someone zapped you as opposed to having their phone off, not hearing your call, etc. With Skype, on the other hand, it’s pretty blatant. You push that big red button and turn your virtual nose up at the caller in a very unambiguous way.
Instant messaging, on the other hand, is soothingly asynchronous, so the person can ignore your message and answer much later, or type a quick note (”in meeting”, “on phone”, etc.). So polite people tend to ask permission asynchronously via IM before imposing their synchronous Skyping on you (or forcing you to snub them).
Not the most efficient practice, however. The solution: put a third (blue?) button next to the green (answer call) and red (bug off) buttons in Skype. If you press this button, the caller should continue to hear a ring tone, but it would be muted on your end. Simultaneously, a chat window with the user appears. So you can type “changing the baby” or “sharpening the Ginsu knives” and opt out of the call without seeming impolite. Of course, you could always refuse the call and then chat manually, but putting an easy-to-push button on the UI would “institutionalize” this so that, psychologically, people would have less reason to hesitate before placing a call.
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