Mugshot - A Closer Look

Yesterday I announced that Red Hat had launched a new open source social networking platform. Thanks to Bryan Clark, one of the Mug Shot Developers, I was able to get in to take a closer look. I was very indifferent with what I saw, but I am keeping a very positive outlook for Mugshot considering that they are in their infancy, and that I like the potential of what open source could bring to the table. In addition their goals for the future excite me (more on this later).

While the team of Mugshot is trying to dispell themselves as “social networking,” they incorporate the friend of a friend system at its core, which to me, throws them into the category of a social networking tool. As of right now Mugshot has two main features, Link Swarm, and Music Radar. With Mugshot, you download a simple program that incorporates into your browser and music player (supports iTunes and Yahoo Music). By clicking on the mugshot icon, you can choose who you want to share the current link or song with, and enter any comments you would like. That link or song is then sent to the Mugshot servers and shared with who you selected. Profiles are very simple, and are built from your participation within Mugshot. Mugshot’s next feature in development is called TV Party.

While I think Mugshot is very easy to use, the requirement to download a program will slow their growth. With the current feature set I would probably say it isn’t worth it. However, as I said before they are in their infancy, and as they and other developers add more features, I can see this becoming a very powerful and popular tool.

What I am even more excited about is where they may be headed in relation to integrating other social networks. In my emails with Bryan, he stated:

“We’re attempting to integrate into other social networks by linking you to to the others…Lots of people are on only friendster and orkut, but not MySpace and they have friends in an opposing set of other sites.  It’s kind of hard to know which ones people are doing.”

I talked about this exact concept in my “Future of Social Networking” post a month ago. I am excited to see that someone is headed in this direction much earlier then I expected. Whether or not Mugshot will be able to integrate this concept in a very useful manner is yet to be seen, but I like where they may be going.

Keep your eye on Mugshot.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Mugshot, Red Hat, Bryan Clark, Brian Balfour[/tags]