Future plans for Moodgeist as of Nov 2007
You may have noticed that not much has been happening with Moodgeist recently. That’s because it remains what it originally started out: a personal research project around Skype mood messages. It remains so.
My original goal was to find out how it is to build a server and clients for such service. This goal was fulfilled a long time ago. So it has continued to run fine as it was with zero maintenance… until this last hosting problem where I had to disable the display part of the site.
I continue to be interested in Moodgeist. Here are some themes that I’d like to work on at some point (beyond just fixing the site and bringing it back online). Many of them, though, are pending because of external factors, so I may get back to it when those factors get resolved.
Rich mood messages
Since a long time ago, Skype supports rich mood messages. This is actually a competitive advantage, since none of the other IM services or web-based mood-type things (Facebook statuses, Twitter) do that. I must say I haven’t looked into Skype’s rich moods yet, but collecting and redisplaying them online could be interesting.
Personalized feeds
The original objective of Moodgeist was to provide personalized mood feeds to people who opt in, but this assumes that Skype provides an API for developers to implement this — either running a headless Skype client on the server, or providing a web authentication API. As of Nov 2007, neither has happened. There is a roadmap that covers some of these things, but this is no good to me until things actually materialize. When they do, I may revisit this and implement this whole personal moods thing.
OpenSocial
I haven’t yet looked into Google’s OpenSocial, but it may be relevant to Moodgeist. (Honestly… I have a million blog posts pending to read about all this, I just physically don’t have the time in Q4 2007 due to me being busy at school… but this won’t last forever and I’ll have breaks in a few months, so I’ll get back to this.) OpenSocial lets Moodgeist be a consumer as well as producer of data from/to other apps. I find implementing various API-s to be an intellectually enriching experience, I’ve always learned something when I do this. So I may get back to OpenSocial at some point. (See also above point about rich moods.)
Core Animation on Leopard
I want to learn about Core Animation on Mac OS X Leopard. Moodgeist Client on Mac is an excellent opportunity to do just this, so I may end up implementing some fun stuff around Core Animation when I get around to installing Leopard.
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