I’m a great fan of Google Talk for its simplicity. Nearly all my friends use Google Talk, and it always open stays in my systray. But one thing I don’t like about GTalk is that it doesn’t let me set my status message as idle. In many situations, you want to be online, but away as well, so providing an option to set our status as idle would have been incredibly useful.
Fortunately, there is a freeware by the name of gAlwaysIdle which enables you to set your status message as idle. Once you install the application, it adds some extra settings to the right-click menu of GTalk icon in systray. You can choose ""Normal Idle", which lets GTalk decide when to set you as idle or "Always Idle", which permanently sets your status as idle or "Never Idle", which will prevent you from appearing as idle.
gAlwaysIdle has some problems running in Vista. You’ll have to run Google Talk in administrator mode, or else you’ll end up getting fatal errors. Hopefully, this bug will be fixed in the next release. It has been a long time since GTalk received any major updates. I’d like to see this feature build right into Google Talk (without installing any third party apps)
gAlwaysIdle Homepage | Download gAlwaysIdle [Mirror]
[Found on Life Rocks]

wrote, on October 31st, 2007
Pidgin used to do the trick well for me with “Away” mode.
but i’ve been using this for a while.
wrote, on October 31st, 2007
That was a useful tool which I was always searching for. Thanks.
wrote, on November 1st, 2007
Thanks for the mention.
wrote, on December 13th, 2008
lovely tool mate !!
wrote, on March 14th, 2009
I tried to download but the directed link is no more available; If anybody could send me the plug in set-up file i ld appriciate that.
my email id: hvishal@aol.in
wrote, on April 2nd, 2009
[...] [hat-tip: TechBuzz] [...]