One of my friends has a status of Snooze. What does this mean?
How is it different to away or busy (apart from it not being available in the list of options)?

3 Answers

According to a moderator on the Steam forums "snooze" is a state automatically applied to users that have been away from their PC for 2 hours or more.

There are other programs that can interface with Steam, and some of these also have the option of manually changing your status to something that is normally not possible to manually set your status to. Therefore, you might find people in the "snooze" state even though they haven't been away that long.

3

Think of it as the instant messenger status "idle". If they are idle, they've been away and not active for a period of time. "Snooze" is exactly the same concept, the user has not been active on Steam for a certain period of time (as Agent states, 2 hours +)

they are afk

Your friend is away from their computer for too long.

1