Recently in skype Category

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.

Moodgeist is an open community initiative by some people at Skype, mainly myself — I got the idea, coded up the system out of my own time and basically “just did it”. Other people have helped me a bit with design and testing out of their own time — thanks. Also involved is Kevin from KhaosLabs who coded the first version of Pinger for Windows and helped me with ideas and thoughts.

You could say it’s a Skype initiative, but we’re deliberately not positioning it as a Skype “offering” because of the experimental nature of the project. Moodgeist serves as a testing and experimenting platform for some of the ideas we have about social tools, personal publishing, feeds, visual representations and such. Over time, the results and feedback of Moodgeist may make it back to Skype software and platform.

So we are doing this first because we have these ideas we want to try out, but secondly, also because it’s just fun, and we haven’t seen such fun efforts around Skype and personal publishing happened, so what’s a better way to get them done than just do them :) We have many ideas about where we may eventually get with this, but the ultimate test of ideas is always when they are “out” on the “market”, and this is why we put Moodgeist out even if it’s not that polished.

A very important part of Moodgeist is to engage with the community and see where it takes us all. If you have any cool ideas about how to use the current feeds, then please do them and tell us — in your blogs and e-mails and other forms of feedback. If you have ideas about where this could or should go, post your comments. If you think we could do something better or are simply dead wrong, tell us too.