All sarcasm aside, this feature is absolutely the wrong direction. Github may have some things in common with social networks, but it operates on a longer-term scale. It's the difference between a book and a paragraph. People who care about this sort of daily minutia can find it plentifully on Twitter and Facebook. Github is great for finding out what people have been up to, without caring about what they're doing this second, and that's what was great about it.
My heart sank a little when I saw this appear on my profile last night. I don't understand which demographic this is meant to target or what the point of it is, I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
The demographic it's targeting is people who use GitHub for daily work professionally, not volunteer open source maintainers (just as the demographic Slack targets is people who are paid to have Slack open 8 hours a day, not community chat rooms, and their product decisions make more sense in that context). But even volunteer open source maintainers are likely to find "On vacation until mm/dd" useful.
> I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
MS didn't acquire GitHub because they cared at all about the technology. It was the exact same strategy as LinkedIn. It's all about tracking us, the developer community, and keeping their finger on the pulse of where things are going. Generating more click event data to further profile your tastes for future commercial use by Microsoft. What other possible reason could there be?
MS cares about developer mindshare. Through GitHub they have access to the worlds largest software developer social network (well it's almost a social network). The large number of open source projects on the site provide a moat and a network effect.
I can hazard a reasonable guess based on my observation of various executive life forms and, oddly, The Office. I obviously do not have data to back it up, but random clicks seem to find random non-code related items on GitHub ( I think HN had pizza recipe example kinda drove that point further for me ). From this I can only gather that someone decided that GitHub should be more.. fun, social place where you interact, interface and collaborate in real time. Just be happy no one announced they are moving everything to a semi-public blockchain.
If you maintain OSS projects, this can be a useful tool to communicate that you are working on a particular, often-requested feature. Or perhaps, that you are on vacation, in hiatus, or sick.
Likewise, this could be a useful feature in the context of enterprise GitHub or private repos used by organizations. Seeing the current status of a coworker without leaving GitHub is a nice plus, especially if they start integrating statuses with tag autocompletion.
Now if they just evolve their "discussions" (formerly issues) into "live discussions", and then add one more feature to allow separating it by "tag" or maybe "topic" per repo, they can pretty much replace Slack.
I think you misunderstand the feature. You don't have to constantly update your status. You can set it once in a while to show what you're up to... if you want to.
And what else is the point of that except to let other people know about your hour-to-hour business? Their gif uses "Shipping [software]" as an example, and even has a "Busy" checkbook they they demonstrate ticking off. When features exist, people use them, and when some people use them, other people are socially pressured into using them to conform to peer expectations. This is the beginning of a bad thing for Github unless MS changes direction. That said, Github arose out of the ashes of Sourceforge completely and utterly failing to deliver frictionless value (and the advent of git), so maybe this will eventually provide an opportunity for an existing (or new?) competitor to rise up and take Github's place in the space of "simple network of git repos".
Usually I do want to know about the hour-to-hour business of the people I am professionally developing software with, and I want them to know about mine. When I send a code review to people elsewhere in the company and it's timely, I want some expectation of whether they're around or I should find another reviewer.
