That is right. Remember, the Millennials, at least most of them, were in high school and college during the hay day of instant messenger. Sure they liked to chat but the real game was their away message. Everyone loved seeing what their friends thought up to put on their away messages. Some put up poems, some just little clues and as I have said, my daughter used to say “In the shower, leave one” which drove me crazy. She knew others could read it but kept insisting no one but her friends in her dorm would care.

I talked in the last blog about the mass migration away from IM towards both texting for fast unthethered communcation, and Facebook for…what? Answer: It’s just the Away Message again, stupid. Facebook calls it the “What are you doing right now” thing which always starts off “Jothy is…” so you can say a lot of different things. My son used to like saying “better than you” back when he was a wise guy. The point is that it is this that they consider the critical feature of Facebook not the Newsfeed which they hate and not even the pictures which lots of sites have.

Where Facebook falls down flat on its face again is that this message is binary: either you have one up on your page or you don’t and the whole world that visits your page can see this message. We think that is dead wrong. Just as you want to control how much information on your profile is seen by the different concentric circles that describe your relationships, you want to control who sees what about what you are doing. Maybe you do want to say “In the shower” but you only want those closest to you seeing it. Everyone else should just see “Away” or nothing.