This device would tell you when a buddy was online, for how long, and keeps a record of when buddies were online and offline. As well it would record their away messages that they had set up while you were away. This i would find useful when trying to figure out where someone is while trying to get a hold of them. For instance if my friend wasnt home when i called then i could see "oh he was just online 5 mins ago, he may have just left". Or if you are spying on someone's activities you may find it useful to know when they are online and keep a record of it.
-- JoeLounsbury, Nov 09 2003

IM watching you http://web.archive....www.imwatching.net/
exactly what you wanted [neilp, Mar 04 2005]

Yahoo and MSN instant messenger. Baked.
-- k_sra, Nov 09 2003


[k_sra] I think [Joe] is actually wanting his own pc to keep track of other users activity, when he himself is away from his own pc. Hence this is not baked via MSN/Yahoo, unless there are any plugins I'm not aware of.

He gets my bun for now anyway.
-- silverstormer, Nov 09 2003


Trillian (a third-party client that supports all the major services) has a logging feature that comes close to this. It doesn't grab the away messages however. But you can grep the log for your buddy's name and easily see when they last logged on, off, went idle or returned from idle.
-- krelnik, Nov 09 2003


Ooookayyyyy. There's a stalker among us...
-- phoenix, Nov 09 2003


widely known to exist (by me anyway) a scary service for scary times
-- neilp, Mar 04 2005


[admin: That site went away in mid-2006 - I've patched the link to point to the archive.org version of it. For more background, do a web search for imwatching.net.]
-- jutta, Jun 06 2007


Isn't it called Instant Messaging?
-- janbest, Jun 06 2007



random, halfbakery