I want to develop a widget that'll allow people to see who of their PS3 friends are online and what they're playing, just like you can see through the Playstation 3 friends menu.

How would i get this info? Is it important enough for Sony to make it difficult to access???

Have you had any luck finding more info on this? Surely its possible.

I am not familiar with PS3, but is this widget for Mac OS X or a different platform? I only ask because there are small programs for it called widgets, and I didn't know if what you were trying to make were the same thing.

Diode

nah man, no luck :s

This widget could be embedded in a web page, or even used in a desktop application (i use windows).

The PSN can access this info, and i presume it's done through http(s)... why haven't the public (not me, i'm lazy) gotten ahold of it yet? or maybe I have a simplistic view of what's actually happening...

It's not safe to assume that HTTP is used exclusively; a server that publishes this information in a webpage could actually use any underlying protocol to collect the information. Just because HTTP is used when you access the information from a webserver doesn't mean that HTTP is used 'between' the PS3 network servers.

I would imagine it is important enough that Sony make it difficult to access. Depending on the type of per-user information available, it may well be illegal ( or break the provider's side of a service agreement ) for Sony to not provide a reasonable level of protection of said information. At the least, it would provide no financial gain to Sony, and potentially draw customers away from their own sites.

If the information can be accessed in any form from any given webpage, then you can probably scrape it; but scraping isn't nice, is often prevented/made difficullt, and wont let you allow any given user to access their own info without first providing you with their passwords; something that users are unlikely to agree to.