moodmessage: March 2006 Archives

Mood messages are a Skype feature that was released in version 2.0 for Windows and version 1.4 for Mac OS X. Essentially, mood message is a piece of arbitrary info that you can enter about yourself and that is then displayed to all of your contacts. Here’s a piece of my contact list that contains various mood messages for people.

We’ve seen that people are entering wildly different stuff about themselves in the mood message. Why it was called “mood” in the first place was that we thought it would be a good place to enter your current mood, i.e how are you currently feeling. Many people use the field for exactly this. Other popular uses are indicating your current location, what you are currently doing, where you are going next, informing others about stuff such as vacation plans etc. People are seemingly not using it for broadcasting particularly private info in mood messages — after all, its use is optimized for publishing and broadcasting, rather than private communication. The whole idea of Moodgeist is to capture all the dynamics happening in the mood messages.

Editing your mood message is easy. First, you can see your current mood message in the top area of what’s called the “events and services” panel, right next to your first name.

To edit the mood message, you can click the panel and an edit area expands, where you just edit the mood.

To set the mood message to a new one, either click the panel title to close the mood panel, or hit the Enter key. To cancel editing and go back to he previous mood, you can hit the Esc key and the previous mood message is restored.