These days I think the use of the word status is often a misnomer.  Wikipedia has an evolved status definition: "Status is a state, condition or situation."  On a minute scale, I think that definition is not bad, but when you look at the definition on social status, we've drastically changed what this means.  

Status has clearly infultrated the social networks, it’s in IMs (I always try to put my location or in office out of office in this one), it’s in Facebook, Twitter, and Live and some companies have even integrated some form of status with SharePoint.  Status is more than just presence of Online or Offline.  It’s more than, "I’m eating breakfast or reading the news."  It is the news that you’re consuming.  It is the breakfast that you’re eating and how good the food is and how quaint or nostalgic that place is... how would you rate it?  Good potato pancakes or a hard to find wine selection? (Maybe I don't care, but someone does.)

The richness to status has taken off so much that the idleness of Online or simply present to the rich “just survived a tremor that shook my home in XXX, and I’m seeing smoke across the street at YYY and not getting through on 911.”

Life will never go back to the mundane and status-less existence we once had.  Now when you have 5 minutes in a line, your mobile companion comes out and your tapping into the status of dozens, hundreds or thousands of friends.  So much for status and the limits to the one liners.  Now you see pictures, GPS coordinates, and a thread of comments with replies, tags and shortened URLs to video, blogs, and limitless possibilities of where it goes from there.  On linked changing your status could mean you are looking for a job, and could ultimately mean a change in career!

A friend recently pulled together a facebook app to rate status!  The winner gets a fine T-Shirt with the status.  Nice social app to encourage richness and clever quips.  If you don’t feel you’ve got a chance of winning you can still rate other’s status and read up on the winners.  A friendly counter ticks down to the end of the contest.

I do think we’ve evolved beyond status...  

            The Question is no longer “What are you doing?”

The Question is what is going on that would be interesting for your friends to comment and read about---  What are you thinking about, philosophizing about, or what do you wish you were doing?

I also like to think that Status has truly evolved to a mass means of communication where the world can tap in.  If I was going to say something that the kid next door, the barber, and the policeman and even your mother could read, the chinese hacker or engineer, the surfer dude in Bali sitting in a kiosk, the Singaporean business man, and Iranian blogger... what would I say.  I imagine this information is retained and in the future our grandkids and future generations of time will filter and tap into this info and learn about our society as the break through society that was able to express itself in an individual way.  It’s very powerful.  Millions of individuals with a voice.  No other time in society have we been able to all express ourselves so easily and have the world tap in and consume it.  This is monumental and will not only shape our future but define a true democracy or it’s evolution of political and social flavors of the future.

If you want to add Status capabilities to SharePoint, how would you do it?

First off the easiest way I think to do this would be to add a one liner to the SharePoint Server Profile... you know, where someone puts in their Bio.  You simply add a new field that is user editable.  Now when you view someone's my site you can see their status.

Next?  I'd look at building a web service to consume this field into a BDC list that could be subscribed to.  A few different default views that people could look at new statuses by department, or simply a change log of changes to the profile would be pretty interesting anyway.  The ability to filter these and consume could be done based on list views or various profile attributes or metadata.  Such as following (alerts) based on group.  I haven't evolved this fully, but you get the idea of where you could go.

Did you know you could favorite a status on twitter?http://twitter.com/joeloleson/favourites  I don't have too many good ones, really.  I do find the best way to comment on status various other online activities is with friendfeed where you "like" and comment on what comes through, which essentially helps others find the good stuff.  What your friends like, you are more likely to like.  Makes sense, no?

Did you also know if you're having problems you can check Twitter's status? http://status.twitter.com/

Now, that's not a bad thing to consider for your SharePoint environment.... Think about sharing the status of your ops team or status of the deployment of SharePoint for the business... Now you're thinking...  There is something useful to all this Twitter Noise.

Other references:

Integrating Twitter Status in SharePoint - SharePoint Evolved

Combining SharePoint and Twitter - Ben the SharePoint Hobbyist

Note: If you like this blog which may have come to you via status.  Then Like it, comment, or tweet about it or update your status to reflect you read it with a shortened URL like tinyurl.com.  Any of the various social tools will work to help spread the news.