Personalised Statuses - Steam Friends

[Alteran Ancient]

Nearly every other messaging platform has this - why not Steam?

Google Talk, Skype, Live Messenger, Yahoo, You-Name-It, they all have some kind of way to display a short status update. Right now, Steam offers no kind of facility for this at all. The Online, Busy and Away tags are taking-up space that could be easily used for such a feature.

At the very least, the basic "Online/Away/Busy/Offline" states could easily be condensed into a small icon - a simple coloured dot would suffice - look at Live Messenger's Green/Yellow/Red/Grey traffic-light style pips, or Skype's Green, Yellow, Outline and Grey icons.

Alternatively, the existing coloured border feature could be expanded-on slightly - it already distinguishes between In-Game/Online/Offline/Blocked. Instead, this could be modified to use a colouring scheme associated with a user's presence.

Once that is out of the way, players then have a way of saying what's on their mind, and now a system has specifically been provided to do this, certain players don't need to change their display name every day to publish an improvised message or status update.

...and before I forget, a Mobile client (Android, iOS, etc.) wouldn't go a miss, either. Valve, you decided to keep the Protocol a secret, so unless you decide otherwise, we are at your mercy on this!

Thanks.