Google talk animated/dynamic status message

The idea hit me when I realized that the only advantage of Google talk / XMPP status messages over facebook/twitter status updates is its dynamic nature. Static status messages are boring and people make an honest effort to flick a quote or a joke from somewhere to get rid of the “Available” status message. XMPP status messages(also called presence/away messages) which can be dynamically changed or animated to give rise to some interesting possibilities.

I wrote the entire XMPP logging in through SSL and roster fetching mechanism using simple PHP. And then ran the script from command line. Then I wrote a couple of functions to deal with some crazy status messages. These functions where implemented in a API fashion so that people can write their own “mini apps” which feed the status messages.

• First I made a scrolling status message “I am not here right now” with a horizontal marquee effect. Then I modified it to provide a basic animation effect by using special ASCII characters to provide a transition to the next status message in the queue.
• I also set an auto reply which would respond to any incoming messages and redirect them to me as text message on my cell phone using my service provider’s (Airtel) Email2SMS gateway.
• Later I put in a function which would randomly pull out a quote, joke or a riddle from funtoosh.com and then display it as a status message changing every 2 mins.
• I also tried out displaying my current location & distance from my home, and the approx time in which I would come online whenever I was travelling. This was done using the Google maps API coupled with Google latitude API where my cell phone kept broadcasting the GPS coordinates which is inturn used to calculated my distance from home and approx time to reach home. This would be an interesting idea to be taken forward some time later as it would give the user’s friends an idea as to when the user will come online next. Also a good idea to show the exact location and a link to the page where google latitude public badge is shown…. just another way to show-off if you are travelling on a holiday.
• I also made used of google shared status method to implement a pseudo menu into google talk. It was done to implement a mechanism for the user to select his dynamic status from the “recent status” dropdown found in google talk. This would eliminate the need for a separate web page or a separate installation for google talk to select one’s dynamic status message (see screenshot). As soon as a user selects a menu item, the script will change the status back to whatever was present before, and would display the new menu.

Some other possible use cases would be :

• A Simple Countdown to new year/christmas/birthday as status message. For eg: Your status message could read 2 days, 10 hours, 24 minutes, 40 seconds to new year 2011, and the timer can decrement every second. This can be a good new year status message
• “Where am I right now” idle message using google latitude. Google latitude does provides an approx location as status message but something more useful would be to provide “Home” , “Office”, “at the grocery store” etc
• “What am I listening to” or “what am I watching” on youtube/grooveshark or any kind of streaming website. I think a few websites already do this.
• Live cricket score/football score for some real sports fans.
• Total visitors on my blog… yet another show off tactic
• Text Ads as a status message based on what is being discussed on chat. Could be a privacy issue, but an interesting way for people to make some quick bucks by showing a text ad at the end of the status message using bit.ly links which will be based on the current custom status or the keywords on the chat history.

The fate

The project has now been inactive for some time as I got busy with other projects. Thus it was never used anywhere. I wanted it to be published as a free service, but the server costs could not be borne by me alone unless there was a way to make some money out of the service. Although I will be happy to continue the project and run it as a service when I can get my own server

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