Moodgeist is an experiment to show what’s currently happening in the “Skype Land” and what’s the Skype community’s “collective state of mind”.
I thought of the above idea when I started Moodgeist somewhere in Q2 2006, and it still remains the idea through 2007 and beyond. It's a personal project that I started, motivated purely by my own natural curiosity and poking at things. And I put down this agenda page to specify the project goals and motivation.
First, Moodgeist brings us interesting data for the public consumption.
Secondly, it's a personal development project that helps me learn how to plan, build, deploy and maintain websites, clients and protocols.
Thirdly, it's a first-hand experience of being a Skype add-on/extra developer, working through the API-s and policies.
As of 2006 and 2007, it's great to see that some companies are springing up doing the same thing. Perhaps http://www.twitter.com and http://www.jaiku.com are the most well-known. I believe there is a lot of room for consolidation and indeed I plan to look into their API-s and do natural things like ping moods from Moodgeist clients into them, as well as see what else we could do together.
The difference between Moodgeist and the other guys is that Moodgeist is strictly Skype-oriented and I do not want to maintain my own userbase. I want to "piggyback" on Skype. However, as of Q2 2007, there is no way to reuse a Skype identity on the web, meaning that we will continue to operate in "anonymous" mode. See ../PrivacyPolicy for details. Once Skype releases a way to reuse their user/security context on websites, Moodgeist will have many more personalization options and will become a showcase/reference for such a website.
Jaanus