[Mickydtron]

It seems like the "Watch" feature would actually take care of this. If both people are watching the same chat, they would both get real time notifications, and could chat in real time. The app limits how many threads you can be watching, though, trying to force you to actively opt-in to things that you want to pay attention to because they are directly relevant to what you are doing right now.

[cesnja]

Well, that seems unfortunate. The value I see in this application is its explicit asynchronous nature which saves you from the burden of checking (or even thinking about) messages or email. The ability to be unreachable where the other party knows about it. Because right now, it's considered rude if I don't manage to reply quickly enough.