I frankly don’t use AIM that much these days, but will often sign on and think, “Wow, lots of people are on tonight!” or, “Wow, almost no one is on tonight!” So I just wanted to list my thought process after noticing this:

1. I’d be interested in seeing a graph of my “buddies” online over time.
2. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a little script to sit on AIM 24/7 and watch this.
3. If I was doing that, I might as well log each time someone signed on and off, which would let me answer those, “I wonder if x has been online in at all lately?” questions.
4. As long as I have a stalker bot going, it’d be even more interesting to grab their away message text and buddy profile.
5. And as long as I’m doing that, I might as well add support for using diff to show changes in the above between any two points in time.

Is there anything that can’t be graphed? Or made into a shell script?