It's a good point that there is a big difference between Internet communications and real life, and we're trying hard to address that difference.
There are a lot of nonverbal cues that you pick up in real life, and you pick up more of these with video than just with text or audio.
There are times when it's polite to knock, like if the office door is closed. If the door is open, or you're working in an open office, coworkers can generally just come and say hi. Working face to face is often best, but it's not possible for some people, and we're trying to enable some part of the working face to face experience for those people.
I know that it's hard to buy that auto-answering will help you be more efficient when working together, but together with automatic status detection, it works well for a lot of our early users. If you're ever in the situation where you want to work face to face with someone, but can't, then give us a try, and if it doesn't work for you, let us know why, and we'll try to build something that does.
There are a lot of nonverbal cues that you pick up in real life, and you pick up more of these with video than just with text or audio.
There are times when it's polite to knock, like if the office door is closed. If the door is open, or you're working in an open office, coworkers can generally just come and say hi. Working face to face is often best, but it's not possible for some people, and we're trying to enable some part of the working face to face experience for those people.
I know that it's hard to buy that auto-answering will help you be more efficient when working together, but together with automatic status detection, it works well for a lot of our early users. If you're ever in the situation where you want to work face to face with someone, but can't, then give us a try, and if it doesn't work for you, let us know why, and we'll try to build something that does.