Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Scenario 1: You forgot(or don't want) to go offline and you are projecting your screen on projector with some serious discussion in a busy conference room and bang! an old friend messages you on messenger "Hi Sexy"

Scenario 2: You are sitting with someone say Mr. A and another friend say Mr. B sends you a message about Mr. A. You know what kind of message I'm talking about


These kind of sudden and uninvited chat messages can disturbing at times. So in one of my previous organization we had a protocol for chatting. I found it very helpful and slowly many of my friends have started following it.

Here's how it goes, PLEASE try to follow the same when chatting with me and may be others too. This will make the online life bit comfortable for you and your friends

[?] To start a conversation, send a question mark only. Yes a simple " ? " only. This can mean anything as per your understanding like "Can we chat?" or "are you there?".

Now the answer to this question can be yes no or later

[Y] So if the answer is YES, the person replies " y ". Which means "I'm comfortable chatting with you at this moment, tell me"

[N] If the answer is NO for reasons like "I'm busy", or "Can't chat" or whatever, the person replies " n ". If you get a " n " DO NOT send any more message, not even "OK, I'll ping you later" It like saying DO NOT DISTURB

[5] or for that matter any number like " 10 " - "15 " means busy right now, lets talk after 5 (or 10-15) minutes. This comes very handy when you want to chat but because you are preoccupied in something which you can't leave in between.

[ ] If in case there is no reply from the other side, there can be 2 reasons. Too busy to say a " n " or not near the computer. The best option in this case is treat it as " n " and DO NOT disturb

Looking at so many shortcuts, we devised another shortcut. It was " b " this time which means BYE that comes at the end of conversation.


I strongly recommend all my friends to use this protocol while starting a chat with me. Share the protocol with your friends and see the difference.

5 comments:

Kinshuk Sunil said...

this makes much sense.. thank you for sharing.. will definitely use it...

Anonymous said...

Hmmm.. it looks like a nice protocol {if everybody in our list is aware of this}..


Cheers,
Ambuj :)

Preeti Shenoy said...

Rohit,
I appreciate your writing this post. But from point of view of a layman if somebody pinged me with just a '?' I would find it extremely rude.
Are we so busy that we cannot type 'Hi. Got a minute?'
Then if the person does not respond back we definitely should not ping again.
Technology is great. Problem is it can be very intrusive especially unwanted messages. We have to be a bit more polite.
And in this craze for short cuts I think we should not forget basic manners.
You made a very valid point about
not pinging back saying 'ok we'll talk later' etc.
Somehow I find not responding easier that saying N or Y. I find that rude.
But yes--I get what you're saying.
Cheers
preeti

Sabhtarsha said...

yeah, this is very usefull, learnt it at ATN and tend to use it with everyone in the chat list :)

Atul Kumthekar said...
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