Shoutbox

Every day, a colleague and I spend much of the day conversing in Windows Messenger (mediated by Live Communications Server from Microsoft). I'd like to see something to log the oral conversation. We actually lose a lot when we forego the benefits of text logs by talking about the stuff instead!

Obviously a voice file can't suffice as a replacement for text. But it would be good to have some things recorded. Here's how I think it should work.

First, it would be recording all the time -- and I suppose it would have to insert that beep every now and then to let people know they're being recorded.

One of the options, though, would be more practical. It would allow for saving only portions of a conversation. Recording would be constant, but would not retain anything older than [10,30,60,120,600] seconds (selectable). When a conversation became interesting, you could click a button that would enable RETENTION of what's being recorded, until the button was toggled off again. Some protocol for naming the saved conversations would be selectable (such as the ability to name them as files, directly). Automatic encoding to mp3, or something like that,  would be cool.

That's the general idea. IMO this would be a killer feature.