Location Information

There is a war going on whether it is appropriate to show location information in your instant messengers buddylist.

Volker decided to remove all people with stupid mood messages from his buddylist. Some guys who showed alternative phone numbers in the mood message like Michael became the next victims – and removed Volker from their list in return.

While all this becomes more and more irrational, Plazes offered a nice little feature to display location information in Skype. Well, obviously not everybody likes that, and there are some questions left about formatting. While not everybody wants to use Plazes but nearly everybody uses Skype I still think the integration makes sense for those of us who travel a lot.

Finally, in yesterdays Sametime 7.5 beta kickoff meeting we saw the location awarness settings of Sametime 7.5:

This is quite usefull. And you can turn it off, if you want to. And the best thing for people like Volker who love a clean buddylist: You can see the location information as a mouse-over.

Maybe Skype will fix this, too.