I saw you in your seat as I was boarding the plane and thought to myself you were someone I wanted to chat with. I’m sitting in the back of the plane. Do you want to chat?
Would you accept such an invite? One of the features consistently mentioned as a feature on the next generation IFE systems is In-Seat Chat (also sometimes referred to as Seat-to-Seat Text Messaging) which is frankly a feature I have a hard time wrapping my head around. IM or text messaging, to me, is more of a method of communicating with someone I already know and not something I would initiate with a stranger. Might be useful when traveling as a group but you usually end up in seats in the same general vicinity as your travel companions so its probably just as easy to start a verbal chat unless you are trying to observe some level of in-flight etiquette (a topic for a future blog post) and don’t want to disturb your fellow passengers in which case it might come in handy. Unless each passenger includes some type of profile why would you initiate a chat with a stranger sitting on the opposite end of the plane or even a few rows up/back? The in-seat chat feature also is to include chat rooms but chat rooms are so the Internet of the 90’s on top of which if the chat rooms are limited to passengers on a given flight the odds of having a decent size chat room are pretty slim. Now, in lieu of the chat rooms what I would find more compelling is In-Flight Twitter where passengers on the flight could micro-blog and use @ replies to start conversations even from opposite ends of the plane and if necessary take that conversation into the in-seat chat client should the conversation need to go into more detail.
What’s your take on in-flight/in-seat chat?
