Lubricating Sincerity

January 6, 2011 2:14 PM

"On GChat, I type many things – sincere and not – that I would never say in person because it’s easy, when typing certain things into a box, to forget whom you are typing to." From Thought Catalog, writer Caroline Bankoff lists 45 things she thinks about when she thinks about google's chat service.

Sample item:
People who select “busy” as their GChat status, which turns the circle next to their name red, are not usually busy. When you type something to a “busy” contact, the program warns: “[Contact] is busy. You may be interrupting.” “May,” indeed. If they were busy, they’d be invisible.

posted by Potomac Avenue (33 comments total)

8. Number of results returned by searching my GChat records for the term “Tao Lin”: 47

Oh no!
posted by R. Mutt at 2:18 PM on January 6, 2011 [4 favorites]

Why Read Thought Catalog?
9. Important conversations happen here.

...

14. Results returned by searching my GChat records for the phrases “good name for a band,” “good band name,” “what I should call my band,” “what we should call our band,” “what I will call my band,” and “what we will call our band”: Philistine Collusion, Tits on a Stick, Better Yet, The NuvaRing, Reptar, The Candy (Ass) (W)Rappers, Joe Wilson’s Outburst, Black Market Fats, White Women in Peril, Shame Spiral.

posted by nathancaswell at 2:19 PM on January 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

1# why use it.
posted by clavdivs at 2:23 PM on January 6, 2011

29. There’s an animated GChat emoticon a contact of mine and I use as a kind of “aloha” in our chats, especially if it’s true that “aloha” can be used to mean pretty much anything. To make the emoticon, one brackets an “at” (@) symbol in tildes (~). When you press return, the characters sort of implode; from their little pixil-ashes rises what is either a beehive with bees flying away from it, or a pile of shit with flies flying around it. I’d say I interpret it as the latter about 70% of the time. I don’t think of it as a Rorschach test.

I learned something today!
posted by theodolite at 2:31 PM on January 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

Started on 3/16/06 have 1844 pages of chats. Fuck there are people I met, became BFF with, and now hate in there.
posted by Ad hominem at 2:31 PM on January 6, 2011

I started on 11/16/06 when I created a gmail account in order to chat with a girl I liked from far away. I now have nearly 4000 saved chats, most of them from girls who are blocked or who have blocked me.

This is the first thing I said:

"9:33 AM me: I hate root beer
9:34 AM it is made of root, you know?
what is root?"

I love gchat.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:39 PM on January 6, 2011

theodolite: "29. There’s an animated GChat emoticon a contact of mine and I use as a kind of “aloha” in our chats, especially if it’s true that “aloha” can be used to mean pretty much anything. To make the emoticon, one brackets an “at” (@) symbol in tildes (~). When you press return, the characters sort of implode; from their little pixil-ashes rises what is either a beehive with bees flying away from it, or a pile of shit with flies flying around it. I’d say I interpret it as the latter about 70% of the time. I don’t think of it as a Rorschach test.

I learned something today!"

4:34 PM me: ~@~
4:35 PM bf: is that a butt pooping out a pile of poop at me?
me: I think it is
bf: wow where did you find that?
me: Metafilter
4:36 PM bf: Figures.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 2:40 PM on January 6, 2011 [9 favorites]

Fuck there are people I met, became BFF with, and now hate in there.

Yeah. I can chart the rise, summit, and plummet of many friendships in my chats. They're sort of painful to have available, especially as they sometimes just pop up on searches. But I'd rather have them than not. A few years ago a deleted all the emails of somebody with whom I had fallen out, and I feel badly about that to this day.
posted by Astro Zombie at 2:40 PM on January 6, 2011

Going through my GChat (as well as my GMail) past is like a super real look at what happened in the past. Things I thought I had forgotten about but were so easily drug up again. I got mad at my boyfriend (again) for something I read in there that happened over 5 years ago, which I was apparently not over...
posted by msbutah at 2:42 PM on January 6, 2011

5:32 PM me: just want to see if this works ~@~
nope
[him]: dang
me: did it do anything ?
5:33 PM [him]: nope
me: oh sucks
5:34 PM ~@~
5:35 PM [him]: ~@~ to you too
me: it works in the web version
Lance: what is it supposed to do
5:36 PM [him]: its a little animation of like a swarm of bees flyinginot a beehive or something
[him]: dang. that sounds awesome

posted by Ad hominem at 2:43 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

There’s an animated GChat emoticon a contact of mine and I use as a kind of “aloha” in our chats, especially if it’s true that “aloha” can be used to mean pretty much anything

1. Aloha, Wikipedia entry:

Aloha in the Hawaiian language means affection, love, peace, compassion and mercy. Since the middle of the 19th century, it also has come to be used as an English greeting to say goodbye and hello. Currently, it is mostly used in the sense of hello; however, it is used as the above.

2. ~@~ will get you an animated pile of poop. Worst misuse "aloha" ever.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:44 PM on January 6, 2011

Worst misuse of "aloha" ever.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:47 PM on January 6, 2011

One of the most annoying things about Metafilter is when someone declares the subject of a post to 'have too much time on their hands', but seriously, this chick has too much time on her hands.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:48 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

full list of gchat emoticons.
posted by crunchland at 2:51 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Not a fan of animated emoticons. Sometimes I will IM code changes to colleagues and it will turn in to a string of gibberish interspaced with smilie guys giving thumbs up and hearts.
posted by Ad hominem at 2:53 PM on January 6, 2011 [13 favorites]

I have never used gchat.

Now I kind of feel like I'm missing out.
posted by madajb at 2:55 PM on January 6, 2011

full list of gchat emoticons.

That's missing at least the pile of shit.

(Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd be typing.)
posted by kmz at 3:02 PM on January 6, 2011

One of the most annoying things about Metafilter is when someone declares the subject of a post to 'have too much time on their hands', but seriously, this chick has too much time on her hands.

Except that she's not old enough for it, that article would make an excellent Newsweek "My Turn." They love to run pieces wherein white people gush about mundane computer-related shit.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:03 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

clavdivs: "1# why use it."

It's just IRC with a fancy XML format. Not so fancy that irssi can't talk to it.

But this post seems about as interesting as Tweeting about Twitter.
posted by pwnguin at 3:09 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

I've just looked at my oldest chat - a friend was talking about going to a sushi restaurant I was reading about in the paper this evening, three and a half years later. Oddly, when I read about it I thought of her. We should go!
posted by mippy at 3:44 PM on January 6, 2011

I'm having a bit of a crappy day, but learning about the poo emoticon made me feel a lot better.
posted by brundlefly at 4:04 PM on January 6, 2011

Ha, my first gchat message (from 3/27/06)
4:51 PM
me: Hey judy, can you see this msg?

Luckily I still talk to Judy (she's my sister).

The second message I sent out was to my brother, he replied he could see it and said he was leaving, and then I replied with "lp"... which was a typo for "ok". My first of many, many typos on gchat.

Time flies, yet some things stay the same :P
posted by Fricka at 4:28 PM on January 6, 2011

From February 25th, 2006 is the first line from my first Gmail chat:

me: i've heard much evil about this little tool

four minutes later, in a very short chat session that was eventually to spawn a beanplated empire ;p

me: hey google... are you listening? I know you're big brother
posted by infini at 7:25 PM on January 6, 2011

Let's all post our first gchat messages!
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:41 PM on January 6, 2011

With dates... we can then see the viral spread of the new service over time in the blue ;p
posted by infini at 7:58 PM on January 6, 2011

Is this something I'd have to be single and be likable to understand?
posted by maxwelton at 8:03 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

HAHAHAHAHA. My first chat, from 2/8/06, with another account also belonging to me:

me: ping, self
other me: oooh, say whatttt
this is so amazingly awesome
me: hear hear
man i'm telling you
i love google
other me: no shit!

I guess I must have been the first person I knew who had it turned on. Glad I'm such a scintillating conversationalist.
posted by little light-giver at 9:00 PM on January 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

People who select “busy” as their GChat status, which turns the circle next to their name red, are not usually busy. When you type something to a “busy” contact, the program warns: “[Contact] is busy. You may be interrupting.” “May,” indeed. If they were busy, they’d be invisible.

I very rarely have the urge to reach through the internet and strangle someone, but this item and the one following made me want to do it. If my friends wonder why I'm almost never on AIM, and even less often on gChat, people like this woman are why. There's a status for when I want to be available to chat and it's called AVAILABLE, not BUSY.
posted by immlass at 10:14 PM on January 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

My last relationship rose and fell almost over gchat and it feels really asymmetric that it ended over the phone and there aren't any records of it.

Unrelated: Times I have said, over GChat, the phrase "Wash, tell me I'm pretty" and had it responded to with "Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion": 3
posted by NoraReed at 11:46 PM on January 6, 2011

Is this something I'd have to be single and be likable to understand?

In 06 I had dozens of peeps on chat. Now I have 2 and they are both work related. Maybe it's time to just shut it down for good.
posted by Ad hominem at 1:55 AM on January 7, 2011

My "first" gchat is on 06/28/07 with someone whose "first" gchat is with me on 01/18/07.

o_O
posted by unknowncommand at 6:20 AM on January 7, 2011

A lot of her points assume you are using GChat through Google directly. If you are using an IM client like Trillian, your user experience may be entirely different.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:43 AM on January 7, 2011

Caroline: why'd they ban tao?
me: He posted a link to his own stuff.
Which counts as spamming.
Even though I'm sure it was done very self-consciously.
Caroline: tao lin is post spam
me: Right, exactly.
So they banned him.
Like, yesterday.
So really, your timing was pretty on.
Caroline: One of the most annoying things about Metafilter is when someone declares the subject of a post to 'have too much time on their hands', but seriously, this chick has too much time on her hands.
COULD NOT BE MORE CORRECT METAFILTER COMMENTER
me: I'll post our gchat in the comments and it will be VERY META.
Caroline: that would be funny

So, you know, here we are.
posted by StopMakingSense at 10:58 AM on January 7, 2011 [1 favorite]