Meet Red Hat’s Mugshot
p2p news / p2pnet: Meet Mugshot, an open source project described in a number of reports as Red Hat’s, "Social-Networking Site," possibly along the lines of MySpace.
But, describing Mugshot as “social networking” is misleading, says Havoc on the site’s blog. “You’ll notice we don’t use that word.”
He goes on:
In part our fault, since if you can’t try the site it’s harder to get it, and we can’t take the load of giving everyone an account right away. Also we’re being deliberately very broad about the project goals.
We’re launching this project in the early stages and want to leave it open to new ideas that we have or others have. That’s why e.g. the TV-related part of the site is totally blank right now.
Leaving aside that we’re trying to launch a project here (not a finished product), I’ll just tell you why I think ’social networking’ is misleading and you can judge for yourself.
The features we advertise to people (for starters) are called Link Swarm and Music Radar. These (for now) are the point of Mugshot if you’re using it.
You’ll notice that the advertised purpose of ‘Music Radar’ is to show off music on your blog or MySpace page… which really makes no sense if Mugshot is a MySpace alternative.
Based on what I know about MySpace users, Mugshot does not provide or substitute for any of the reasons they use MySpace.
While your Mugshot account tracks a list of friends, you can’t do any of the activities people usually do on social networking sites – such as blog, post comments on other people’s profiles, extensively customize your profile, or ‘list infos’ – that last in the immortal words of demetri martin (on YouTube, same on official Daily Show site).
We don’t plan to implement those features, either, unless there’s some kind of unexpected demand for them from people using the site.
Also, Mugshot lacks what I’d consider a defining feature of ’social networking’ – the ‘do you want to be my friend?’ request – in Mugshot, we just store anyone you correspond with as a contact/friend, which is also what your email application would do for example. You can read more about this on the developer site.
Mugshot goes a bit further than your email app and displays your friends to your other friends (but not the world), and lets your friends see a bit more about you than strangers, so the friend list is a bit more than a list of contacts. (The ‘friends only’ visibility of things is also a notable difference from MySpace at least, I don’t know about other social network sites.)
If we want to get technical/architectural instead of talking about user experience, not that I recommend it, another aspect of Mugshot that makes it different is that the whole site is seamlessly glued to a client-side app, and all these apps are connected in real time by an XMPP server. So we use this for real-time music tracking and notification about shared web sites, and it could be used for a lot more things.
Mugshot is designed to create a, "live social experience around entertainment," says the FAQ.
It currently offers Link Swarm ("Share web links with individuals or groups in real time, and get live feedback when people visit those links") and Music Radar ("Show off the music you listen to using services like iTunes, Yahoo! Music, and others on your web site, blog or MySpace page").
Mugshot works with most mainstream applications and currently supports Windows XP and Linux platforms, "with limited support for Apple’s OS X," says Red Hat.
Go here for the Mugshot open source project site, including source code for the client and server, project information, blog, and more.
Go here for a small scale, limited access user trial of the Mugshot service.
Digg this story.
Also See:
blog – Social Networking, May 31, 2006
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June 4th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
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