Ah, see: this is what we used to have finger for! When I was in university, I had a little shell script than I ran when I logged in to the UNIX system that asked me where I was, what I was doing, how long I thought I’d be there, and if I wanted visitors. This would get written to my .plan. Then people could grep the list of users online, and see where I was, and if they wanted and I was cool with it, they could swing by.

I think extending FOAF, or coming up with some kind of lightweight XML DTD for sharing personal status would completely take off. Someone could even figure out a way to use a stripped-down Jabber client for it that does nothing but poll your friends’ status.

Surely there’s got to be some way to do this with RSS? Some little PHP script that could be run through PHP with Magpie that can give you a dashboard of your friends status?