I decided to work with away messages for Project #4. I took the away messages from my friends on my buddy list and put them into 6 different categories--school related messages, election related messages, "I'll be back messages," philosophical messages, random messages, and angry messages. Then, I asked my friends to IM their friends away messages and added them to the 6 different categories. I used powerpoint to display my findings.
The category with the most away messages was random away messages. It seems like people like to put random sayings on their away message to attract people like me, who stalk people through AIM. The second most used away message was the "I'll be back like I left something category," which basically is a fancy way to stay I'll be back.
In general, when comparing my buddy's away messages to their buddy's away messages, both were very similar. All of the messages pretty much fell into the categories that I created from my buddy's away messages. I did not find too many scandalous things through away messages. The most I found were swear words. I guess my buddy wasn't having a good day.
With my findings I found that there is no distinct purpose for an away message. Some people use it as an actual answering machine. When your friends see that you are 'away" from your computer (which is a default away message) they will IM you anyway knowing that you will get the message when you return to your computer. Much like an actual answering machine.
Other people use their away message to limit the amount of people who IM them--sort of like a filtering technique. Less people are likely to bother you when you are "away." When I am logged onto my AIM account, I find that people will randomly IM me and start meaningless conversation if my away message is not up. Even when I put my away message up, people will still IM me. So, I guess I sometimes I have to be offline or invisible in order to avoid conversations.
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