My friend Tim Waugh[1] pinged me yesterday, to invite me to something called Mugshot.
I had a vague recollection of reading something about this last year, but I never looked into it. These days, of course, if it is even vaguely “Web 2.0”-related I just have to play – witness my addiction to Flickr, Plazes, and blogs; and my passing interest in MySpace and Vox (which I’ll talk more about, soon).
Here’s a summary of Mugshot, from the Red Hat magazine last June:
The focus of Mugshot is to foster the creation of live social experiences around entertainment, all in the context of an open project.
This is how it works. You add information about your website, blog, and other networks (Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.fm etc.) to your profile. You build a network. Once you’ve done that, you can install a small application which sits in the system tray. When updates are detected in your network, you get alerted to them via a little pop-up list called the Stacker. The desktop app is currently available for Linux and Windows, and a Mac version is being worked on. Mugshot integrates with your music player (well… some music players) and enables you to share your current playlists on your blog. There’s also something called the Web Swarm – a way of sharing web pages and feeds with friends and groups on Mugshot, via a Firefox bookmarklet.
So what?
I’m not sure, really. I’ve barely started to look at it, so my opinion is very flexible. It is easy to use, and pretty cool to see the Stacker pop up new items from time to time. The thing that keeps looping in my mind is that my RSS reader already lets me follow blogs that I’m interested in; if I was a Last.fm user I could share playlists; and if I had a del.icio.us profile, I could share my web links. Mugshot appears to let me integrate all of those interests together. With the proliferation of social networks, integration is certainly helpful… but so far I’ve yet to get really excited about it. Maybe once I start seeing my network grow and things starting to appear in my Stacker more often, I’ll get addicted like my dealer wants me to.
One thing I’m slightly confused by is the concept of Groups. There are groups in Mugshot, based on activities like, say, cooking (!), or being a Firefox user. The idea is that you can share links with interested communities. When I went browsing, though, I found that I was only able to sign-up to a group as a “follower”, rather than as a member, and as a result I can’t share links – I can only do that with people in my network (which is still rather small). I’m sure I’ll figure it all out eventually.
As I said earlier, I was sure that I’d heard of Mugshot before, but I couldn’t remember where. I wondered what kind of interest it had attracted so far, so I did a bit of hunting and pulled up a few articles from when it first surfaced, in the middle of last year. The Guardian’s Technology section spotted it, as did internetnews. Interestingly they both comment on the fact that del.icio.us and Last.fm have been in this space for a while, but the focus is clearly slightly different here. The entertainment angle is something that I see mentioned in most of the articles. From internetnews:
Red Hat doesn’t consider Mugshot a replacement for social networking sites, but rather as a tool that will work with them to add what Red Hat calls “live social experiences” to the mix.
So, I’m going to give this a try. If you’re as much of a magpie for new, cool things as I am… let me know, and I’ll invite you 🙂
And I can hardly finish this post without pointing you at my own Mugshot page.
[1] Tim is a Red Hat engineer; Linux printing maestro; hacker extraordinaire; one-time elk; and without Tim, to be honest, I would probably have never gotten a decent mark in AO Level Maths… spent so much time with Acorn computers… or become temporarily addicted to south coast radio station Power FM during my mid-teens. The man has a lot to answer for.
Nice footnote! ‘Hacker extraordinaire’??
I remember something about egg races too..
Aha. You’re right about that. I think I was more responsible than you were for those, though.
Thanks for the invite, Andy! I haven’t had a chance to really play with it, but it looks promising.
Well, so far, I’ve had some issues:
– stability… I keep getting crashes somewhere in the Pango library. I need to open a Bugzilla report at some stage.
– can’t seem to get it to recognise when I have music playing via iTunes (and I don’t use Rhapsody or Yahoo! Music Player)
However, it was quite fun to be able to chat about shared links and abuse Tim’s musical choices earlier. I’ll keep playing a while longer 😉
This looks like something worth looking into. I’ve been looking for different ways to manage my network sites now…this might be the solution I was looking for. I’ll have to play around with it and see…thanks for pointing me here!
Thanks for the visit Heidi, I’m glad you found the post useful. Let me know if you need an invite.
The only thing I would say is that it doesn’t cover every network at the moment – so Vox (which I know you use) isn’t currently part of the profile for Mugshot. But they are extending it all the time, it is open source, and by all means have a play with it and let me know what you think!
Here’s a list of some of the services that they are looking to support (which now includes Plazes, thanks to a nudge from me!)
Thanks Andy, I noticed that link of future services on their site yesterday. I set up my mugshot yesterday too, I think I just added yours to my network just now.
Of all of these types of services I tried I found this one to be the most user friendly. I got an invite to join ProfileLinker yesterday and I thought their site was really confusing to navigate compared to Mugshot…but I haven’t played around with that one too much yet.
I noticed they didn’t include all sites on Mugshot, I set up Vox as a blog but I set up my real blog as a website. I think all they would have to do is let users assign multiple blogs and I bet you could add just about anything to the site. I found that they were open source encouraging, I suspect that it won’t take too long to develop around the rest of these applications that people are asking for.
It looks like the first issue I encountered (Mugshot opening IE instead of Firefox on Windows, even when FF is the default browser) has just been fixed in their source code repository. I raised a couple of other bugs so hopefully they can get some of the Windows client issues sorted… and create that Mac client that Kelly is so desperate for.
OK, I’m up to a network of 4 (!). Any more takers? 😉
Oh yeah, I noticed both of those things yesterday. I was having problems with the Windows client, I can’t get it to login…I can’t figure out how to even get it to login actually, the login interface is a bit confusing. Password is optional? Seems kind of strange.
It’s cool that the FF thing is fixed already! Just goes to show how cool open source is. I’m taking a Linux/Unix class this upcoming semester and I’ve already decided that I’ll be writing my research paper on open source, I know I’ll have fun researching that one 🙂
Personally, I set a password, and use it to login. I agree that it is confusing.
Couple of tips:
– hold Ctrl and left click on the Windows system tray icon, you get a menu which lets you sign out or force the window to popup.
– hold Ctrl and right click on the icon, and you get another menu with a Preferences option. You can use that to make it forget your login credentials. I don’t think you want to mess with the other options, though.
Enjoy the class. Happy to be a research guinea pig if you need questions answered.
[…] to learn more about our thinking in terms of virtual worlds… and I even introduced him to Mugshot and Windows Live Writer, so I like to think I had an impact on his life, […]
[…] recap: I was introduced to Mugshot, which made me want to be able to share my playlist. To do that I started using iTunes. Then I got […]