GTalk Status Message

[Sumit]

Hi folks,

Is there a way i could change my status messages using the gadgets
api? A simple use case is to show the currently playing music from my
computer (I know that GTalk supports the same but i want to implement
some other use case which requires a similar control on status
messages) or fetching some quotes from a remote url and show it in the
status. Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Sumit

[moi...@google.com]

The gadgets.realtime API doesn't support status messages; it's meant
to be fairly container-neutral so that the API could be implemented by
other gadget hosts without tying them to a particular IM protocol (or
IM at all).

The typical answer to this has been, "use XMPP" -- you can use
libjingle or any of the other open-source XMPP libraries to set your
own status message. We've thought about doing this with a RESTful API.
Would that work for you? I can propose it to the team and see if
someone wants to pick it up as a 20% project; it would be pretty cool.

Thanks!

-Moishe

[Sumit]

Hi Moishe,

Thanks for quick response. RESTful API would be to update the status
but i wonder how this API would be called from the GTalk container
(embedded into the browser window). Basically i want this
functionality to be available automatically without any user
intervention. Something like the user adds this gadget (google gadget
i mean) and then whenever he logs in, his status changes automatically
if he is not invisible. Do we have any such interaction defined
between the container and gadget runtime (or something similar)? If
you've any other idea, even remotely hacky way :-) (purely browser
based requiring no manual intervention), please do share the same.

Appreciate it.
-Sumit

[moi...@google.com]

Any change to the status message would require authentication, so some
form of user interaction would be necessary. As a user, I'd want
control over which gadgets can change my status message (and what they
change it to). The gadgets.realtime APIs right now are predicated on a
trust model where the gadgets don't have access to anything about the
users who are hosting them except the shared-state blob. It's possible
we'll add some deeper integration but we'll need to start adding
access-control as that happens so it's probably further out.

[Moishe Lettvin]

What are you thinking about using the status message for? The more solid arguments there are that a gadget should be able to do this, the more likely it is to get done :)

Thanks again for your feedback-

-Moishe

[Sumit]

There can be many use cases Moishe. A simple use case as i mentioned
could be fetching quotes from brainyquotes.com or some "Thought of the
day" service and display as status message on GTalk. Most of my
friends do it manually right now (they hit a quote somewhere and put
into their IM statuses). The idea can be really simple but i'm sure
users want it (i take my friends list as a sample set of users for
example and the hit rate was pretty high). Do you think it would be
interesting enough for someone there to take this up?

On Jul 13, 10:22 pm, Moishe Lettvin <mois...@google.com> wrote:
> What are you thinking about using the status message for? The more solid
> arguments there are that a gadget should be able to do this, the more likely
> it is to get done :)
>
> Thanks again for your feedback-
>
> -Moishe
>