In my last post about the “I am Online” feature I mentioned at the end that I think the status of being online equals the fact that I am available for a free chat.
This has something to do with the Lord of the Rings, kind of.
Why Lord of the Rings? Well, because J.R.R. Tolkien did the same to fantasy literature what Skype and other VoIP clients did to communication on the internet. He sat standards which everyone after him implemented. For example the Orcs. Most fantasy worlds include Orcs as the bad boys. It’s a standard.The same is of course for other genres like Sci-Fi etc.
But let’s look at the standards Skype sat and that we take for granted and as given. First of all: VoIP is free of charge. That’s of course a big problem for Skype but they chose to go this way first and basically everyone using Skype is using it because it is free.
But the standards that is important for the “I am online” feature is of course the little green light which shows that you are online. But over time it became more than the indicator of your status, it became a sign for “contact me, I am free for a chat“.
I think the direction this came from are IM services which included a voice chat function later on like MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AOL and so on. Skype was at the beginning a free replacement for expensive phone calls overseas, to keep in touch with your family, friends or business contacts, of course.
When Skype started to build communities and interest groups and introduced the “Skype Me” feature it all changed. You suddenly got contacted by people you did not know. And they did not make a difference between “I am Online” or “Skype Me” as both is a green button.
The other aggregator for this issue are language learning communities. They use the same signs and tools on their websites as everybody knows them from the internet. And now it is getting interesting. We know that language learning communities get far more users than platforms. So the chance that a new visitor on a platform like Myngle or eduFire was first on a community like Livemocha, Busuu or Babbel is fairly high. And as even teachers have problems to understand the difference of the two concepts how can you expect students can?
So a green “I am online” for those students does not mean “I am free for a consultation lesson that shall lead to buying paid ones” but “Let’s have a free chat“.
If I log in to my Livemocha or italki account just to check my mails or my bookings I get about 5 to 10 friend invites in the first 5 minutes if I am not setting my status on “Offline“. On Livemocha I also get immediately chat requests, of course. Same phenomenon when I log in to my Yahoo messenger account. Instantly chat messages start to pop up.
Hence I think this is an issue educational companies that want to implement such a feature on their website have to think about. It can be quite disruptive and annoying to get bombarded by chat requests while you are learning or teaching. I don’t blame those guys for it because for them it is a fact that if I am online and speak a language they want to learn or practice they are welcome to contact me. They simply don’t make a difference between language exchange and paid lesson services.
And by the way, here is a taped proof. In the latest Mixergy interview of Andrew with Noah Kagan, Co-Founder of Gambit watch until about 7:30 minutes (well, you should watch the whole interview, because it is really good) but there you will see what I mean 
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