I wrote a overly complex crawler in C to grab away messages from IM networks as fast as rate limiting would allow. Then created a web frontend for viewing all of the status messages from your friends.
It was cool since in most clients at the time you needed to click on a friend and select "get info" for each status you wanted to read. Feeds for status make much more sense. However, I got tired of trying to reverse engineer the changes in various closed protocols (oscar, etc). So I did more than ponder this when I was in college, I tried it.
It was called AwayGrabber (www.awaygrabber.com).
I wrote a overly complex crawler in C to grab away messages from IM networks as fast as rate limiting would allow. Then created a web frontend for viewing all of the status messages from your friends.
It was cool since in most clients at the time you needed to click on a friend and select "get info" for each status you wanted to read. Feeds for status make much more sense. However, I got tired of trying to reverse engineer the changes in various closed protocols (oscar, etc). So I did more than ponder this when I was in college, I tried it.