Find your Invisible Google chat buddies

Finding invisible chat buddies is something which I think is quite interesting. It is always fun to ping a person who thinks that he is visible to none. While there are many ways to discover invisible buddies in yahoo (Will blog about it later), I badly wanted to do this in Google chat as well. Recently read an article in this regard. Well, let me show you how it works.

Initiate a new chat with the user, whose status you want to find and set the chat as "Off the record". This method works only if chat is set off the record.

Initiating the chat

Going off the record

Now send a message to the user. If the user is online or invisible the chat message will get delivered. If offline, you will get an error message that the user is offline and can't receive messages right now.

If you receive this message then your buddy is really offline

If you don't receive any error message, then your buddy is invisible

Now let's justify the reason behind going off the record. When the chat is not set off the record, the message you send will get delivered to your buddy by default. If he/she is online or invisible, a window pops up with your message and if he/she is offline then it gets delivered into his/her inbox as a mail. When you go off the record, if your buddy is offline it wont be delivered to inbox, but you will get a message as is offline and can't receive messages right now.

The conclusion is that, when you set the chat off the record, ping your buddy and dont get any error message, bingo!! You found one...