Take Note, Google Wave
It can be turned off, sure — but the whole concept of instantly sending what you’re typing to the other party just seems like such a novelty. Jens Alfke learnt this first-hand:
The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it out in the next release.
