Messaging applications often provide “presence” support, where your contacts are annotated to show if they’re available, busy, or whatnot.
When you’re working, there’s some tradeoffs with presence information: It can act as a social forcing function which affects people’s work life balance. There’s a been some pushback on presence.
Being home with the baby, I’ve been thinking a bit about presence for socialization though. I really wish there was a way for me to say “Hey! I’m totally open for video chatting with someone", or “Hey, I’m totally open to texting!”.
Maybe it’s me, but there’s an awkwardness to cold-calls, but I would love it if I was feeling like chatting with someone, and could put it out there in the world, and someone might just call me.
I feel like if this was done right, it would be a way of creating a ‘social media’ that’s more synchronous, but also more personal and fun.