That doesn't make sense, Joi. What of those people who are online but not using orkut?

While it's not a 100% way of determining who is online, with a network as large as Joi's, I would suspect it's a good method of triangulation.

Tribe.net literally indicates if the person is currently logged into tribe in addition to bubbling up the most recently logged in.

I have been thinking about this for a few months now. It seems that you can learn a lot about people from these networks. You can kind of stalk people on line.

All your friends are always listed. Those most recently online are listed first (at least the last time I checked about two weeks ago).

Why bother? Aren't 90% of your friends always on line? Mine are.
And aren't there existing, better ways of seeing this? (e.g. IM). Who goes to Orkut to check if his friends are on line, and then based on that sends them email or IMs them?
One of the beauties of email is its asynchronous nature. Use it.
One of the beauties of IM is that it's instantaneous. Use it.

I would disagree. If you know someone's on Orkut or was just on Orkut, you know they have nothing better to do. Much easier to strike up a casual conversation. I personally hate it when I get IMed with non-critical stuff when I'm busy.

90% of the time that I'm online, I'd rather not receive an IM, but when I'm cruising Orkut, I'd be happy to get an IM.

I agree. I don't like getting IMed when I am in a middle of something. But one has to wonder: why have an IM open if you are so busy, then? I guess turning it on/off requires too much work.
Perhaps one day we'll have smarter IM clients.
Perhaps one day voice recognition will be advanced and common enough to allow me to control my IM client using just my voice. How lazy can we get....

I get a lot of emergency IMs. IM is standard way for someone to get in touch with me quickly for work related stuff. I guess it would be nice to have more granularity on how your presence shows up, but I generally have IM on when I'm on the computer. I know someone who has "email me unless it's an emergency" in their IM profile.

i like the "email me unless it's an emergency", i'm going to use that. a lot better than typing quick curt responses and feeling a bit harried. it's funny how i can easily say "i'll call them back later", but find it difficult to not respond to an IM. is it that the novelty still hasn't worn off?

Away Messages are a common way to indicate one's unavailability when it comes to chatting and presence. Do many professionals use customized away messages?

American college students tend to use away messages for bite-sized blogging amongst the friends on their AIM Buddy List. In doing my senior thesis project [ http://buddygopher.com/ ] , I've found that the average college student on my campus posts five unique away messages _per day_. I guess presence is much different in an always-on environment like a college campus.

Hey Nick that looks great... we've got some empirical studies of our BuddySpace (http://www.buddyspace.org) users comin up, which I'll post to you... as for the 'orkut/IRC/IM/email' interactions mentioned above, I have two thoughts:
1. Similar issues were vexing me this very evening, prompting me to do a Google search for (guess what): irc orkut
That's how I found this particular weblog entry... top hit!
2. Many superficially similar interaction regimes have very subtle differences in their 'affordances', i.e. what extra behaviours and properties are most salient and immediately apparent to users. This is why at different times, and depending upon our different moods, there are better and worse ways to find people or to have chance interactions! Indeed, the very same things that drive you crazy in one modality or in one context turn out to be mission-critical in another, which is why there's no 'resolution' to this issue... it's all 'horses for courses', so to speak.