It turns out someone else liked IM status messages, too
I got a great bit of feedback regarding Thursday's post about IM status messages. In that post, I basically said that I had looked at those short blobs of text from different people within the company and thought it could be turned into something more.
Little did I know, years before, someone at Microsoft also noticed the utility of IM status messages. Check out this snippet from a Vanity Fair article which was published earlier this summer:
In 2003, a young developer noticed that friends in college signed up for AIM exclusively and left it running most of the time. The reason? They wanted to use the program's status message, which allowed them to type a short note telling their online buddies what they were doing, even when they weren't at the computer. Messages like 'gone shopping' and 'studying for my exams' became commonplace.
I'm glad to see that someone else thought those things were valuable. If nothing else, it means I wasn't alone in thinking it.
Thanks to Omar for the tip.