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Status Facets

Yesterday, browsing through TUAW I stumbled upon moodswings, a plugin for QuickSilver that allows for simultaneous update of your status message through different chat system and web services (as of this version: Adium, iChat, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook). It also incorporates some parsing magic to embed extra infos as your latest played track in iTunes or local weather. Sweet, we all love semantic sugar.

So I eagerly downloaded the thing and tried it… just to found out that the solution is not there, yet… or not so easy anyway: even with all the overlapping of communities that we are subject to, even with all the fuss and stress and tension toward DRY, still the affordance expressed by each and every of these tools is fairly different. The way I use twitter is far from the way I update my status on facebook (where also the implicit syntax is different), and then also on Skype it seem to me more natural to state my location and general availability rather than the microserendipities that I twitter about (oh, and speaking of Skype… have a look at the latest beta for Mac, AddressBook integration is -starting to be- sweet). Even Jaiku, that at first sight could seem just a perfect overlap on Twitter’s behaviour, moves in subtly different ways by the mean of commentability and the availability of channels.

In the end I think moodswing is an excellent starting point, but the next step must be the ability to differentiate the output on each channel, giving each one the right emphasys: in my case that would be location on Skype, mid-term focus on facebook, solipsistic haikus on twitter and so on.

Oh, and please, let’s add Plazes support :)

This was written by bru. Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007, at 11:50. Filed under Chaos. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.
  • gino

    Yes, each of those messages are about your “status” but status is ambiguous term when referred to a person. Again, even if we can agree about what the status is, the way anybody communicates that is depending on the medium in use and on the community on target. Then about status, “one fits all” (the networks) does not work.

  • http://blog.circlesixdesign.com Brett Terpstra

    I know what you mean. I’ve found a median way of posting to all 6 at the same time, but it requires a dumbing down of the syntax in order to make sense in each context. I just released MoodBlast, which is standalone. I’m wondering, after reading your post, if it might be prudent to offer additional (optional) inputs for each service, so you could use it as a central communication point for all updates, but still customize for the way each one poses its query. And I played with Plazes, but the update API just isn’t there yet. It’s promised by the developers soon, though.

  • Pingback: Twitter Hacks » Blog Archive » MoodSwing and MoodBlast

  • http://chaosncoffee.com bru

    Gino: yep, agree.

    Brett: Yes I was thinking of some way of customising the outputs to different channels, so that maybe you can instruct skype to just keep up with location updates, adium to sync with current tune and mood swings, facebook to cope with the annoying “is” in front of the status sentence, and so on. And about plazes… you’re right! Let’s ping Felix for that ;)

This work by Riccardo Cambiassi is licensed under a Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.