tMood Twitterformat Proposal
Syntax
/mood happy|sad|excited|...@user /mood
- happy|sad|excited|...: possible moods
Summary
The tMood Twitterformat (e.g., /mood excited) lets you set your current mood. Twitter clients that support tMood could, for example, display your current mood next to your Twitter picture (perhaps as a smiley face or simply in text).
Raison d'être
Setting your mood is a common action in certain instant messenger applications and social networks (e.g., MySpace). It aims to make up for some of the information that's lost when you go from face-to-face to written communication. It may just help to frame your communication with your friends and followers. Or just take it as a frivolous little feature!
Manual usage
The tMood Twitterformat is simple enough to be authored manually by users. e.g.,
/mood happy
The above sets your mood to "happy".
You can also query a user for her current mood:
@aral /mood
The above will return "happy".
Implementation guide for Twitter client authors
A. Authoring
No special implementation for authoring is necessary (see Manual Usage, above). However you can make tMood more visible (and fun) for your users with the following optional implementation:
- Display a list of moods that the user can choose from, perhaps using smileys/emoticons to liven it up a little
B. Presenting
When a tweet containing a tMood update is received:
- Display the user's mood next to their avatar in the timeline
License
This Twitterformat Proposal is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.