Moodgeist is an open community initiative by some people at Skype, mainly myself — I got the idea, coded up the system out of my own time and basically “just did it”. Other people have helped me a bit with design and testing out of their own time — thanks. Also involved is Kevin from KhaosLabs who coded the first version of Pinger for Windows and helped me with ideas and thoughts.
You could say it’s a Skype initiative, but we’re deliberately not positioning it as a Skype “offering” because of the experimental nature of the project. Moodgeist serves as a testing and experimenting platform for some of the ideas we have about social tools, personal publishing, feeds, visual representations and such. Over time, the results and feedback of Moodgeist may make it back to Skype software and platform.
So we are doing this first because we have these ideas we want to try out, but secondly, also because it’s just fun, and we haven’t seen such fun efforts around Skype and personal publishing happened, so what’s a better way to get them done than just do them :) We have many ideas about where we may eventually get with this, but the ultimate test of ideas is always when they are “out” on the “market”, and this is why we put Moodgeist out even if it’s not that polished.
A very important part of Moodgeist is to engage with the community and see where it takes us all. If you have any cool ideas about how to use the current feeds, then please do them and tell us — in your blogs and e-mails and other forms of feedback. If you have ideas about where this could or should go, post your comments. If you think we could do something better or are simply dead wrong, tell us too.