I am posting this completion as an excuse to call attention to another completion of this task, from many Eras ago, so you can see epicness and beauty. Much in the spirit of the following quote:

From a ransom note: "This is no joke. I am enclosing a joke so you will be able to tell the difference." -Woody Allen

I decided to create a physical representation of something that had been influencing my life lately more than I would care to acknowledge: Skype status symbols.
You know, those little ovals that tell you if your friends are connected or not, so you can start a chat window with them. I think there are little sounds too when someone gets connected or disconnected, but what does it all for me are the symbols.
Oh, the happiness of seeing the green oval of my Australian friend/lover, who keeps the weirdest sleep-wake schedule; the warm feeling of seeing the green oval of this historian/anthropologist gal who´s almost always connected, like a neighbor.
Skype has also icons for "unavailable", "busy" and "absent", which are supossedly there for conferring subtler information on the users: "he/she is actually connected to a chat program but can´t be bothered to talk to anybody", "he/she is too lazy to turn the thing off while cooking and eating". I ´ve had, however, the greatest conversations with "absent" and "unavailable" people, so I think those icons don´t really work that well.
But the "connected" and "unconnected" ones are fantastic: they allow you to actually know when people wants to talk and when they don´t. That is a luxury you don´t have in real life, it just doesn´t happen.
You have to rely on difficult and subjective body language readings, awkward attempts at empathy, "if I were him/her" games. Not easy.
Because there is this whole layer of politeness clouding things, so that if you misinterpret someone once, and you start a conversation that he/she didn´t want to start, you´re bound to misinterpret it again later. Because no-one would even tell you: "You know what? I don´t really feel like talking right now". Unless they are really pissed off, and if so, it doesn´t matter how true, that sentence would be one of the most hurtful things to say to anybody, and everyone would tend to feel like crap after it has been said.

So I think I would be really great to have "willing/unwilling to talk" symbols in real life.

This is the prototype.