I set to work figuring out how to set the status from outside the application.  I went with the same approach that I had used before, simulating a local user via Win32 Window messages.  This is a great solution because it doesn’t interfere with any actions that a user may be performing locally – you don’t even know it is happening.

I broke this project up into the two logical components, the part that gets the twitter feed and the part that actually does the work of setting the status.  What I’ve come up with is a little command line utility to set the status.

It can be used like so:

DigsbyStatus.exe "This is my new status message"

Or, to clear the status:

DigsbyStatus.exe ""

Quotes are needed as to simulate a “blank” argument.  The status classification can’t be changed, so you will still be available or away based on the protocol and the last state of the computer.  I figure someone else might find this useful to, say, update status based on some unsupported media player.

Download: DigsbyStatus_100.zip [10KB]