Red Hat Launches Entertainment-Centric 'Mugshot'

Havoc Pennington writes "A small team of us have been working on a new project called Mugshot, we're calling it a "live social experience" and hoping it will bring open source to more people who aren't using it already. The project is public as of this morning. Check out the developer site for more."

Mugshot? Mugshot you said?

[Anonymous Coward]

The always classy Havoc Pennington of Red Hat today announced a new project, named "Mugshot". And I ask you: what is Mugshot? From the front-page of the project you get absolutely no information of what it does. Reading its "About" page we get a bit more information, but we still can't quite pinpoint what it is exactly: "Mugshot is an open project to create a live social experience around entertainment." We had to read the... Terms and Conditions page just to get a better idea: "Mugshot is an online service that enables Users to share information and communicate with others."

In other words, this Mugshot thing, is nothing but yet another Orkut/Friendster/MySpace-kind of social networking site and client, but with a twist towards entertainment and media sharing. What a useless project. Is this Pennington's super secret project that he has been working on for the past year? Is this what he spent Red Hat's money on? On yet-another social networking site? Instead of using his team, money and energy making Linux and Gnome better (e.g. adding a full Bluetooth front-end, fix the damned phone/pda sync app that's been in alpha for 4 years now, or add video chat on Gaim, or make Nautilus ask for the root password when you try to copy/delete files out of your ~ folder), he spends it on this thing that only interests teenagers -- and only for a fortnight until they move on to something else? I am in complete shock.

Classic corporation communication

[Bogtha]

Does the Slashvertisment tell me what it does? Nope.

Does the website tell me what it is? Nope.

Does the developer site tell me what it is? Nope.

Does the FAQ entitled "What is Mugshot?" tell me what it is? Nope.

If you want to know what it is, you have to read the FAQ entitled What does it do? [mugshot.org], in which it explains:

Mugshot currently offers two activities:

• Link Swarm - Share web links with individuals or groups in real time, and get live feedback when people visit those links
• 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 mainstream applications like iTunes, Yahoo! Music Engine, Firefox and Internet Explorer and currently supports Windows XP and Linux platforms, with limited support for Apple's OS X.

So basically it's like del.icio.us with added media specialisation. Timothy, isn't it your job to make sure writeups include enough information to make sense?

Re:100% Serious (don't get mad)...

[Havoc Pennington]

We're trying to do a variety of things that might appeal to people who aren't using Linux or open source already. There isn't necessarily a strong connection between all of them (though there is some "platform" that we've been sharing among features so far, such as an XMPP server connecting everyone's desktop, friend lists, groups, etc.)

There are two very specific features we already started on:
http://mugshot.org/links-learnmore [mugshot.org]
http://mugshot.org/radar-learnmore [mugshot.org]

So those are very specific, but the project is open to all kinds of stuff, no need to artificially limit it.