SPDCA: Status

As I think I mentioned, I'm not super happy with the direction Google is taking their chat/IM/Hangouts thing. Nor do I really care for the timelines from Facebook, or the arbitrary limitations of Twitter. But really, it's Gchat/Hangouts that's bugging me the most.

It's nice that they have video, voice, and SMS chat. And "offline delivery." And integrate seamlessly into the rest of the Google ecosystem.

But they fucking with something I didn't realize I missed until it was gone: Status Indicators.

... Why? I don't really know. Maybe it's because I spent my formative years logged in to an IM service. Maybe I don't care to see a feed, or a stream, or a timeline. Maybe I just want a list of the latest updates from people. At a glance. Maybe I'm just angry that even the old Gmail chat client only stored the history of your last three (or five?) custom statuses.

Anyhow. idkfa now has a sort of status mechanism (also accessible via the "Statuses" link in the top navigation). Use this however you see fit. If you want to post random movie quotes or song lyrics, great. If you want to post which album you're listening to currently, also great. If you want to tell us where in the world you happen to be because otherwise we would have no idea, that would also be swell (you know who you are). I've set up the item called "State Machine."

Status posts are not included in the "latest post" window, but will appear in searches and also appear "unread" if you haven't read them yet. If you want to exclude the "State Machine" item, you can remove it from the results with "-item:17"