What is Moodgeist?
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.
How can I use Moodgeist?
You can use Moodgeist in two ways.
if you just want to browse the data, then you can do so right on moodgeist.com front page, or use our feeds if you need some other feeds.
it would be great if you also pinged Moodgeist with data for your own contacts. This helps us all to get a more complete “big picture”. For this, please install the Pinger program and just leave it running — there’s nothing more you need to do. You will then see data from your own contacts showing up in the “collective state of mind”.
How does Moodgeist work?
Moodgeist consists of two parts.
“pinger” is the program that sits in the computers of the users who have chosen to install it, and “pings” over the data from their Skype contact lists to the Moodgeist server. Read more about the pinger and Ping protocol.
- “server” is moodgeist.com — it collects and stores the pinged data and publishes it for everyone to see and use.
Here's a diagram.
Are there any privacy or security concerns around Moodgeist?
The “mood messages” concept is quite new and part of Moodgeist’s objective is to test out how people feel about this kind of thing. See our privacy policy for more.
What does “moodgeist” mean?
Moodgeist is a derivative of the “zeitgeist” theme. (Thanks to Teller for the name suggestion.) We call it “moodgeist” because it’s based on Skype’s “mood messages” feature.
Who built Moodgeist?
Moodgeist is an off-hours community initiative by some people working at Skype and some other people interested in Skype. See more contacts on the project page.
I have some comments or questions. How can I contact you guys?
It’s great you have feedback. Please post them on your blog and trackback to us, or post your comments in the Moodgeist blog. If you want to write us e-mail, you can do so by writing webmaster ‘at’ moodgeist.com. Or, you can come join our public chat on Skype, where you can talk with us in realtime.