FriendStatus IM Statuses Aggregator for Nokia N900

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

FriendStatus was originally announced at iFanr blog.
Download FriendStatus at maemo.org.

Hello, world!

So, "Hello, world!" is not an unexpected title for a programmer's first blog post. I started writing personal diary at age of 16. The year was 2000, and I was in the second year of high school then. To be honest, I showed little sign of technical talent or even interest before 2004. Therefore, I did not start blogging until the beginning of 2005, when the hype of Web 2.0 was rapidly rising in China.

Now I am called by my colleagues as mobile applications and Internet services freak, as I continuously tried out new mobile applications and services, and recommended good stuff to them. This is probably because I am the youngest guy in our team, you know, young people are more easily attracted by novel things.

I used to write a lot about my life in this old blog (sorry most posts are in Chinese). For this blog, I would like to make it less personal, and emphasize more on my job experiences (mobile Linux device and application development), my ideas about mobile industry, and recommending cool mobile applications and Internet services.

"A Journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step." It is a famous Chinese phrase written 2500 years ago. And this is my first step.