This reminds me of an earlier talk we had about how Twitter was evidence of ever shorter attention span. An era of instant small digestible information, where we consume bits of info in small chunks and move instantly onto the next one. It's rather scary.

As for response time, my personal feelings is that I have no real problem with long response time. Instant messenger isn't phoning someone nor would I bother treating it as such, because in that case I might as well Skype the person if I wanted to apply those type of etiquettes.

Instant massager for me is instant email messaging all in one environment where it's kept together. I certainly do my best to inform of when I'm going to be slow responding, or apologise if I felt that I've left the conversation hanging for too long, but I do it out of politeness when I can remember. I get lost in stuff, cus I don't stare at the IM all day, it pretty much sits in the background for passing messages back and forth.

As for netiquettes, people certainly lack them, but I suppose it's bound to happen. I mean it's not exactly like it's your parents who are going to teach you it at a young age now is it?