Phone matchmaker

I've been thinking a bit about the strange and evolving etiquette around phone calls. It used to be that you would just call someone if you wanted to talk to them, but that was in a time where real-time voice conversation was the only effective way to communicate outside of a physical meeting. These days we have all sorts of other systems: various kinds of text messages, voice messages, picture chats, forum threads, tickets/issue trackers... Point is that an actual real-time voice or video call is considered a fairly presumptuous thing; it says "I want your entire attention right this second".

The two schools of thought on this are either, well, there's an ignore button right there, so call anyone whenever you want, or the opposite: you shouldn't call someone except in an emergency or via prior agreement. I feel somewhat compelled by the former, I mean, what's the difference between saying "hey can I call you now" and having a box pop up that says "someone wants to call you now"? But the way phone interfaces work is that phone calls are meant to be preemptive and quite intrusive. The phone supports this idea of the phone call as a you-have-to-deal-with-it-right-now form of communication.

On the other hand, it seems somewhat overwrought to have such elaborate rituals around phone calling. Sending a text message to ask someone if you can call them, or even worse sending a text message that turns into a time scheduling conversation that turns into a calendar invite that turns into a phone call. Ugh. Then again, being interrupted by phone calls when you're trying to work is super irritating. Why is this person calling me? What do they want? Is it important? The only way to find out is to take the call and hope it was for a good reason.

So here's my humble suggestion: a phone matchmaker. There's no such thing as phone call anymore, only a phone agreement. You send a phone request with a time range and a reason, ie "I would like to talk to you sometime in the next hour about our upcoming demo". The recipient then selects a time in that range, like 15 minutes from now, or a range within that range, like any time after 4pm. Once you have a definite time, the phone call is booked in, and when the time comes your phones will display a countdown and automatically connect to each other.

In the phone-call-equivalent case, the request looks like "I would like to talk to you as soon as possible for general chatting", and the recipient can say "how about right now?", in which case there is some minimum countdown before the meeting starts, say 10 seconds or something. When the countdown starts, the call can be snoozed for a few minutes like an alarm, or even canceled entirely. The matchmaker would also integrate both ways with existing calendaring systems, so you could do the scheduling out of band but the phone call would start at the scheduled time. And everytime you send a request it would also appear in your calendar.

Either way, the point is to decouple the idea of real-time conversation from making a real-time decision. Having to decide whether to commit your full attention to something on no notice with no reason is a terrible experience. Worse still, once you know how annoying it is to receive a phone call you never want to make one. But sometimes real-time conversation is the best tool for the job, and I think taking away the annoyances associated with it would make that tool far more useful.