Ah, well, so I had been working on a path similar to Sak, with a stylized spherebot design. Unfortuntely it doesn't work well at 16x16.
What I had in mind was to use this as the base. Ranking would be determined by a league icon set in the background. Obviously there are no leagues yet, much less league insignia, but here is a sample:
Spherebot color would then represent other things, like community status (admin, dev, contributor).
The reverse could also be done, with spherebot colors for rankings and background icons for community status.
Friend status is kind of a special status, so it could have a different symbol floating around there:
So if I make any progress on this it will be to try to make 16x16 usable, work out league designs, and set up my source file so that icons can be automatically generated for easy maintenance.