Perhaps I'm old school but I have a presence dilemma. I'm referring of course to the presence status of many instant messaging applications that show all my contacts whether I'm currently online, offline or in a state in between.
For me the dilemma is that I feel that there is a difference between being online and having time or being in the mood to engage in a conversation. When I receive an instant message out of the blue and don't have time to respond I sometimes don't feel comfortable to reject the conversation as that might be seen by the other party as rude, especially if he or she is also 'old school'. Also I have to remember to 'text back' once I have time. Also not ideal.
I could of course set my client to 'invisible' but then I would forget later on to switch it back to 'available' when I am or feel reachable again. And no, I don't want to go fully offline with my instant messaging client as sometimes I still want to be reachable for a select audience.
Yes, human interaction is complicated (or perhaps it's just me?) and instant messaging presence is far from reflecting my reachability status.
It’s not only you. I have the same issue on bussiness. We have the fancy Lotus Sametime. I started with a whitelist concept. But soon i discovered, that this is not the best solution. Even when i want to contact a person which is not in my whitlist it is not possible. On the other hand i don’t like to blacklist people. In general there is room for improovement but i doubt if this is possible 😉