Patent ID: 7890123

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of providing information about a location attributable to a user of an electronic communications system to other users of the electronic communications system, the method comprising: accessing an indication of a location attributable to a user of an electronic communications system; in response to accessing the indication of the location attributable to the user of the electronic communications system, updating a message that is descriptive of the user of the electronic communications system to include a descriptive representation of the location attributable to the user of the electronic communications system; making available the updated message, which is descriptive of the user of the electronic communications system and which has been updated to include the descriptive representation of the location attributable to the user of the electronic communications system, to only a first limited subset of users of the electronic communications system; and making available an alternative message, which is descriptive of the user but which has not been similarly updated to include the descriptive representation of the location attributable to the user of the electronic communications system, to a second limited subset of users of the electronic communications system as an alternative to the message that is descriptive of the user of the electronic communications system and that includes the descriptive representation of the location attributable to the user of the electronic communications system.