FriendStatus collects and stores presence status messages from all your friends across multiple Instant Messaging (IM) services supported by Telepathy, including Gtalk, Skype, Ovi and all Jabber based services, as well as MSN, QQ, Yahoo, AIM and all other protocols supported by libpurple.The motivation is that sharing short status update becomes extremely popular on the Internet. This is partially due to the rise of social networking services (SNS) especially Twitter and Facebook. However, in Asia, particularly China, sharing statuses via IM network is perhaps more preferable than SNS. Most of my MSN and QQ friends update their status messages very often. The content can range from what they are doing, their mood, music they are listening, their holiday or travel plan to popular phrases from Internet, notifying their new phone numbers, and some interesting URLs they want to share.
Maemo 5 contacts application shows you latest statuses of your friends across different IM services. FriendStatus stores these statuses and presents them on a timeline. It also provides a view to display all statuses from a specific friend. Moreover, you can interact with your friends via phone, SMS or IM if you find their statuses interesting.
The benefit of the idea is that you can get status updates from your established social relationship without registering a new account. Instead, FriendStatus leverages your existing accounts and relationships on multiple IM networks. Some IM services (e.g. MSN and QQ) have already provided status messages logging feature. However, as far as I know, no one has yet provided a mobile application that aggregates status updates from multiple IM servics into one view.
Main timeline view, showing statuses aggregated from my friends on Skype, Gtalk, MSN, Ovi, etc
Friend view, showing status history of a specific friend
