publishing: March 2006 Archives

There’s a bit of controversy in how Moogeist treats users’ mood messages. In short, it can be summarized as follows.

In Skype’s contact and authorization model, mood messages are displayed only to the contacts who you have “authorized” (or, in recent version, “exchanged contact details with”). Moodgeist circumvents this by displaying mood messages to the wide world, including people who you haven’t authorized.

Now… at first sight, this may seem like a pretty unsmart thing to do and actively violate the mandated privacy model. But we decided to go ahead with Moodgeist in its current format for the following main reasons. (UPDATE March 29: in addition to what’s said below, we now use SkypeWeb for opt in.)