I run DoorManBot, which does offline message relaying on AIM. Despite being very aware that I can send an offline message just by opening another window to DoorManBot, when using the native AIM client, I find that I rarely do so.

The TerraIM client supports offline messaging by offering to relay the message if the user is unavailable. However, even when using TerraIM, I find that I am only slightly more likely to take advantage of this.

Using Gaim with buddy pounce, I still would not take advantage of sending offline messages, despite the completely native integration.

So, I would agree that AIM has users trained not to think of the possibility to communicate with offline users, even when it is possible at varying levels of integration.

Back when I worked on iChat, the input line was the indicator whether the other person was online. If they went offline, the input line disappeared, then it came back when they came back online. Simple and functional. But with the advent of “invisible” mode they took that out, because the user might be invisible instead of offline.

As for whether or not one should use Normal Messages—I think Gabber’s solution was an interesting one for attempting to explore these sorts of thought experiments, but it only worked at all because my target audience was Linux users :) Don’t mistake me: I don’t want to see Normal Messages rise from the dead (where they probably belong for most cases).

iChat’s real issue, I think, is that its primary protocol is AIM. From what I understand of AIM’s protocol in this area, it’s basically impossible to design a good UI. People can appear offline, but actually just be invisible, so the only way to know whether or not a message can get to them is to actually try to send the message and then get AIM’s error. That’s why we get the annoying sheets in iChat windows. To make matters possibly more trained, iChat now won’t even let me double-click an offline AIM user to even try to send them a message, yet it still does what was described before—so there’s two types of training going on telling me that I simply shouldn’t bother trying to IM people who don’t appear online. (One thing which I do think may be a design issue with iChat is that there’s no quick and easy way to tell whether or not someone’s online from a chat window—you have to hope the messages were displayed in the window and read those to figure it out)

That, of course, is interesting in and of itself, in that it’s an instance of a network protocol pretty much dictating bad UI. The Jabber people don’t usually want to hear that that’s possible. :)

I do think offline messaging is important/useful, but there are reasons people aren’t using it much (the largest one probably being just that pretty much nothing supports it).

Other than the quick delivery, what benefit does email-like IM have?
And why does messaging offline people matter? If they’re offline it doesn’t matter that the message could have been delivered quickly.

Sorry to sound contrarian … this is just something that used to annoy the hell out of me in old-school IM programs, and I’ve never heard anyone defend it before =)

Our members are on a mix of Exodus (PC) and PSI (Mac) so, if iChat doesn’t support offline, then I need to convince the Mac users not to change over from PSI.

Thanks