Red Hat has launched a mould-breaking open source thingy called Mugshot, which includes link swarming (join a bandwagon or participate in a 'herd effect'!) and music radar (let other people know what you are listening to!). Most exciting of all, will help geeks to get together and have parties based on watching TV: a whole world of Lost, Desperate Housewives and re-runs of Friends beckons. (Well, let's not go mad: it may be enough just to have online chats while watching television.)
Some early reports have mistakenly referred to Mugshot as a social networking site, possibly somewhat like MySpace. As Havoc points out on the Mugshot blog:
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".
Since swarming (cf the Slashdot effect), music radar and watching bad TV make up roughly 98.4% of the average geek's experience of the world, Mugshots should do well. However, it's open source, so if it's missing something important -- probably something connected with extra large pizzas, diet coke and science fiction movies on DVD -- then you'll be able to write the code yourself, and run the whole thing on your own server.
It's hard to say much about Mugshot as long as you can't try it (there's a FAQ), but so far it sounds like the ideal application for any half dozen guys who happen to share a house.
As Red Hat's Bryan Clark says:
The effect is awesome, I'm not sure how else to describe it. You can try to slap feature labels on it, like comments or group chat but the effect is not any of those things. Saying you have to experience it is kind of a copout but I've tried describing how it works to others and I've failed. It's fun, a few people said it's "like crack" but they could have been on crack at the time and just talking about that.
