There is something equivalent in windows: Winamp has a plugin that changes yahoo messenger's status to display the current playing song. I searched the net but couldn't find one. Does anybody know if there is one for Xmms?

I'd say it's a plugin for yahoo messenger you possibly need something like InfoPipe for xmms (plugin) so that the song information can be get from the player, but I'm quite sure you need somekind of plugin for the yahoo messenger app itself so it displays the song name...I mean, how could xmms suddenly control yahoo messenger? wouldn't it be a lot easier (and more sensible?) if yahoo messenger would control itself and only ask xmms for what it's playing

at least with irc-stuff this works like that...irssi, x-chat etc. nearly all of the famous irc-clients have some plugin that reads xmms's song somehow (from InfoPipe or whatever) and then do the job by themselves...Xmms's plugins are listed in it's website at xmms.org, but I'd say you should google for yahoo messenger plugin (I don't know if it supports plugins..haven't used..but hey, you asked heh)

Yahoo messenger doesn't support plug-ins. On windows there is a winamp plugin found here: http://www.brokenvaporware.com/products/msgramp/

I don't know how it changes the status. It could access the memory directly(improbable) or it can send a window message or something. I dunno. The problem is that in linux you can run multiple instances of yahoo messenger, and a poor plugin wouldn't know to which instance to change the status.

ok...sounds odd though. anyway, look xmms.org and if you can't find, and google can't help you, you're out of luck I guess :/

I don't know that there is a program to do that for Yahoo messenger per se, but if you were to try using Gaim, you could then use AutoProfile to switch your status message like you want.

http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~casey/autoprofile

Yep, thank you. Gaim/autoprofile seems the right way to do it.