Havoc gave his keynote segment at the Red Hat Summit announcing the project our group has been working on for the past couple months. It’s called Mugshot and our team has been working on it for a little while.

If you’re looking to understand what Mugshot is, take a look at the blog and the developer site which attempt to explain what we’re doing better than slashdot comments. Take a look to Havoc’s post on Mugshot and Social Networking for a good comparison of what we’re doing to other things.

I wanted to describe a little of the design of Mugshot and what went into that, it’s late for me so I’ll keep this first one brief.

Link Swarm

The Link Swarm (dev) part is designed around this idea of Swarming (read that link, no really). When someone shares a link to a set of friends there is a building of momentum surrounding that share activity that takes place when the people involved are available.

This is how most of the activity on Mugshot is taking place right now. Shares are not meant to be invading and because of the way the swarming works you can look at a new link on your own time; unless that link becomes too interesting to not see what everyone else is looking at. This came from some researching and observing of how people share links through email and IM and other ways; and what effect the method of sharing has on the way people share them. We’ve created a new method for sharing which hopefully creates a new effect.

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.

There’s lots more to do on this, which is why we created this as an open project, hoping others would enjoy it and be interested in helping out in whatever ways they’d like to.

Technical Confusion

Just to clear a little confusion, there is a Windows Client as well as a Linux Client and both work equally well. Of course with out the server and an invitation / account neither is very useful to you. Don’t worry those invitations are coming soon!