Like many if not most folk who make a living with computers, for the past few years, I’ve spent as much or more time communicating with others via chat software as with voice, or full-featured sight and sound (ie: in person). Even if all parties type and read fast and well, and have at hand a library of the most ingenious and appropriate emoticons know to the art, a major functional gap between pre-ubiquitous electronic communication, face-to- face or over-the-phone chatting and ... chatting, is obvious to me (though it’s taken some thought to put a finger on it): you can’t tell with as much certainty if your partner is a text chat expects a reply as you can in a voice conversation.

So I propose a pretty straightforward new pair of buttons be added to chat applications the world over: “Expectancy” up and down. This would be coupled with some sort of display on the partnered app - a number, a meter, a changing face, sounds, etc. – conveying how strongly one expects a reply. As your partner fails to reply, you can signal your impatience by clicking your “up” button, raising her/his meter in a polite yet clear and persistent way, without cluttering the chat window (which, in the biz world, we often save into notes) with an annoying stream of “yt?”, “???” or more emphatic text utterances.
-- CraigD, Aug 10 2012

[+]. It could be made backwards compatible by agreeing to a text-based way of indicating expectation, e.g. a series of carets or V's, which would also serve as such a signal and could be converted to an expectation meter at the other end if the facility exists.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 11 2012



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