Some excerpts of an interview of Jaiku's co-founder Jyri Engeström in 606tech deals with very relevant aspects about the intricate relationship between technologies and the pragmatic of communication:

"We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them."

Why do I blog this? what is of interest to me here is what I bolded in the excerpt: the assumption that this kind of awareness application is meaningful and relevant for people who already know about the sender. In terms of pragmatics, the reason for that is because the Jaikus themselves can be seen as "coordination devices" that adds up to the current past experiences and knowledge people have about their peers. What is even more important is that these coordination devices are not automatically captured and sent to the others, they're really sent on purpose (this then eventually raises their value).