IM for Home

Houses need instant messaging. I don’t mean “everyone in a home needs IM.” I mean that homes need an electronic message board in the kitchen that would display incoming IMs, so that when I call home and my wife isn’t there, I can simply send an IM.

She may not check voice mail, because the only way Verizon lets us know we have any is with the stuttering dial tone. And she may not get around to e-mail till later. And all I need to say is, “I’m not coming home for lunch.”

So houses need an IM “board” in the kitchen for just these sort of thing. “Call Mom.” “Running late.” “Don’t forget doctor appt.” You get the idea.

Now go make it.

Shouldn’t be hard: a simple LCD display with a WiFi connection built in to tie it to the network. Config software would let you identify it on an IM service, so you could make it “Home11355″ on AIM or Yahoo Messenger. Then you could just send a message to the service and it would appear on the board. (That would also get rid of potential spam because you could always get a new AIM ID.)

Heck, you could probably just do e-mail, now that I think about it. Hmm.