Before read receipts, typing indicators, and permanently connected phones, people sometimes had to announce that they had gone to take a shower.
AwayMessages.com is a surviving catalog of the little status notes people posted on AIM and other instant-messaging clients when they stepped away from the keyboard.
The homepage still sorts messages into categories such as bathroom, bored, food, friendship, funny, insults, partying, romance, school, shower, sleep, and inspirational.
That taxonomy is nearly a social history by itself.
A status message used to be an event
An AIM away message was part utility and part performance.
It told friends you were unavailable, but it could also be a joke, lyric, insult, inside reference, flirtation, or carefully selected fragment of teenage philosophy.
AwayMessages.com turned that behavior into a searchable library.
Its setup guide explains how to enable away messages in AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and Google Talk. It also documents an AIM trick in which %n inside a message would be replaced with the screen name of the person reading it—a tiny personalization feature that produced years of prank messages.
The site expanded into buddy icons, message articles, status-message collections, and related social-web material. Its footer dates the project to 2001, placing it squarely inside the period when an instant-messenger client might sit open for hours on the family computer.
The interesting part now is not whether any particular joke is funny.
It is that thousands of tiny social scripts were considered worth collecting at all.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes plenty of technical history, but pages like this preserve behavior—how people signaled absence, personality, mood, and availability before modern social apps standardized those things.
An away message was only a sentence or two.
For a while, that sentence was your front door.