Mugshot: Red Hat's open source social networking site

by Jordan Running May 31st 2006

Social networking isn't exactly a sector I'd have expected Linux developer Red Hat to jump into (insert joke about geeks socializing here), but that's what they've done with Mugshot. Mugshot's stated purpose is "to create a live social experience around entertainment," and perhaps what's most notable about Mugshot is that it's open source, i.e. if you want you can download the source code to the Mugshot server and set up your own social networking site, and you can contribute code to the project as well. That's something you'll probably never see News Corp., ~~Six Apart~~, or even AOL allow. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow praises a demo of Mugshot he saw at the Red Hat Summit this week, saying, "it was pretty hot; they nicked the best stuff out of all the social networking sites and put them together in an open codebase."

Correction: Six Apart VP Anil Dash wrote in to remind us that LiveJournal, owned by Six Apart and one of the first social networking apps, is totally open source and has spawned many clones with millions of users, and that many of the web's most popular sites rely on its components (in particular memcached). Thanks, Anil!

Tags: mugshot, opensource, redhat, social, socialnetwork

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

BiZwiKi.CN said 3:17AM on 6-01-2006

too much news and posts for mugshot today, now you're the first one who offer a snapshoot for the reader.

SocialDegree said 12:04PM on 6-01-2006

I'm not sure why they praised it on Boing Boing. While I think they have a great start at Mugshot, their current feature set isn't worth the download required.

It will become a much more powerful tool when they add in other features besides Link Swarm and Music Radar.

-Brian
http://www.socialdegree.com

Anil said 4:00PM on 6-01-2006

Um, you do know that we at Six Apart run LiveJournal, which has been totally open source since being founded 7 years ago? And that the infrastructure behind LiveJournal runs parts of sites like Bloglines, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and dozens of other large-scale sites? And that there are millions of people not just on the livejournal.com service, but on the many clones of the service?

C'mon, if you're going to call us out, at least get close to the facts.

Jordan Running said 4:37PM on 6-01-2006

Thanks for reminding me, Anil. I'm well aware that LiveJournal is open source (have I mentioned that I'm a happy LiveJournal user?), and unless I'm mistaken all of Weblogs, Inc.'s blogs run on memcached, but it slipped my mind when I wrote this post. Mea culpa.

Anil said 10:58PM on 6-05-2006

Thanks for the update, and sorry for the disgruntled tone there. Blogging is hard work. ;)

autonews said 9:27AM on 8-07-2006

I visited their blog and I found many interesting things there. I'm sure they'll make huge progress

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