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Can’t be bothered to type “goodbye” at the end of IM conversation?  That’s okay - Microsoft wants to do it for you.  The real kicker, though, is that Microsoft also wants to patent this practice.

A U.S. patent application states, “a converser may be insulted when the user terminates a conversation without saying goodbye or may consider it to be rude to end a conversation abruptly without a communication that the conversation is ending.”  Well, all right.

There’s no need to patent a tool that would automatically send goodbye messages, however.  Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of the idea, Cade Metz notes, “You could argue that IRC clients have offered this sort of thing for years . . .”

So is it just me, or is Microsoft going increasingly loony?  Steve Ballmer alone has generated several odd quotes in the past couple of months, and then there’s the $240-million-for-a-1.6-percent-stake-in-Facebook thing to consider.

With any luck, Patent Application 20070255800 will be killed.  Without any luck, well . . . look for Microsoft to patent something related to round objects with spokes.