Skype Etiquette
February 9, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I’d like to begin a bit of a chat about Skype etiquette. Most of us use it more and more because after all, who wants to be faced with a massive phone bill for dealing with overseas calls, and those interminably long mobile calls – to the UK, US, etc?
But I do think it’s time that we ‘all’ agreed on some form of etiquette. It can be quite annoying when you’ve left a skype IM chat and it keeps beeping to bring you back . . . or when people on the other end of a skype voice chat don’t give it that mili second to kick in.
I’d like to get the ball rolling by making a rule about closing skype IM chats. When the person who called you says things like, “Bye Now”, “Talk to you later”, “Ciao”, or “See ya”. . . . the polite action is to respond in 1 line - you may choose to use words echoing that of the person who called, or icons 
or a combination of both.
Person 1: I have to go now. Bye.
Person 2: Bye
[At this stage person 1 is making to leave skype and on to some other application]
Person 2: Have a great evening
[Person 1 feels they ought to respond out of politeness]
Person 1: Yes. You too. Bye now.
Person 2: I’m looking forward to working with you on this project.
[Person 1 is getting a bit irritated. They've had to leave their other app again. Person 1 chooses to ignore this comment because after all they've said good bye twice, pleasantly.]
A few seconds pass….person 1 is working on a document elsewhere. . . the skype thing starts jumping up and down (mac users will know what this means)
Person 2: That’s it from me. See ya!
[Person 1's blood pressure gets a little high. If Skype let you do a virtual hand to talk to, Person 1 would be doing it right now]
You see this kind of thing isn’t necessary. When someone says see ya, know that it means: get off of my screen now, you and your skype avatar, I’m done with you, moving on.
Have you got any other points of etiquette to add?
Comments (3 responses)
I find pulling the network or power cord (accidentally of course) to most effective way to stop these kind of Cringeworthy situations.
Paul
What about when to use smileys and when not?
Starting a new group chat with the same people who were chatting a few hours ago instead of finding the old chat in the menu. Grrrr. I have normally left the old window open, hence my dislike of the new window appearing.
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