Interesting. The idle time is kind of a strange thing isn't it. On iChat you can turn off idle time tracking.

I'm another member of your random audience whom you don't know, but I know quite a few people (including myself) who sometimes read into IM idle times that way...

There is other information that you can send besides idle time (or lack thereof if you turn it off)... for example, our friend Jeff Schwartz uses a iChat hack (iChat status) to display what song iTunes is currently playing.

I found myself inclined toward that sort of behavior recently. I found the following quote that sums up the general phenomenon rather poetically.

Before when you broke up with someone, you had to deal with maybe bumping into each other at a party, or hearing about your ex from a friend. But now technology enables you to keep informed from afar -- whether you mean to or not -- by exposing you to weblog entries, Friendster testimonials and details, and perhaps the worst of all, real-time tab-keeping via IM (I notice s/he's not online, is s/he out on a date with someone?!)

The horror of modern relationships isn't the confusion about roles, reticence about marriage, or the lived-together-broke-up-who-originally-bought-the-Office Space DVD mystery, it's the technology enabling you to keep in contact with an ex when all you want to do is purge them from your heart.

(You people don't IM during sex? How bizarre.)

This is yet another example of "publicy" - a word I coined to describe the (Marshall McLuhan Laws of Media) reversal of privacy when accelerated to a high degree by instantaneous communications. Publicy occurs when we reveal in a public way (and largely under our control) what was once private and/or intimate. The ultimate publicy is perhaps the "outering" of private mind and stream of consciousness via weblogs; the now defunct Jenni-cam was an early example of publicy.

McLuhan noted (in 1964) that "we transfer our consciousness" to the world's "electronic nervous system" via computer networks. In doing so, what was inside our heads is "outered" for all to see, hear and feel - this includes fuelling the imaginations of former girl/boy-friends.