October 9, 2007

Status messages or State of mind messages?


"A little spark of light for your interest... gives you many reasons to work hard"

That's what one of my junior colleagues had put as his status message on Google talk! It's interesting to observe that these messages convey more than status and are more widely and increasingly used to convey one's 'state of mind' or some 'life messages' which are useful to everyone. Another contact on my Gtalk! list uses the status message to communicate his location, 'Oxford, UK' for example.

Given that many people do not merely copy quotes from internet and in fact write personal learnings from experiences, it becomes a very good channel to share life lessons, and what's more, people intently read status messages. The status messages are often so interesting, that in my company, I've started a column "Status message of the week" in our official newsletter.

But then what conveys the status of availability? Ah! leave it to those green, orange and red buttons!

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