Talk:Mugshot (website)

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Outage

Does anyone know what happened? Mtijn (talk) 22:38, 4 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So if you are interested in what happened to Mugshot (as I am), here are some things I managed to find out.

Everything so far indicates this project was lead by Havoc Pennington. I'm not sure who, apart from Bryan Clark (currently UI designer at Mozilla Messaging, then Interaction Designer at Red Hat) and Christopher Blizzard (also currently at Mozilla, who wasn't on the Mugshot team but did interact with Bryan and Havoc) were the other contributors. Owen Taylor, who's involved in GNOME and still hangs out in #online-desktop @ irc.gnome.org and also still works at Red Hat, may or may not have been involved as well. It might be possible to figure out the other contributors by analyzing the code / revision history at magnetism.

Havoc left Red Hat around February of 2008 to join litl. With him focusing on other things it seems that the project simply died.

Jerry Schuman (Who is this? Was he involved in Mugshot?) founded Perssonas which runs on top of Mugshot (well, the fork, Magnetism). I'm not sure if or how much Perssonas has modified the original code.

What I still don't know:

Why it was killed. From what it seems nobody involved, neither Havoc, Ryan nor Christopher have written about this. Suddenly it was gone and not a word was spoken. This is the most confusing bit.

What happened to the developer wiki and/or the content that was originally there? Some of it is on archive.org but it's slow to retrieve and a lot is missing. I'm personally mostly interested in vision related things and user interface mockups.

Here are a bunch of links:

The GNOME Online Desktop wiki page (pretty much dead)
"Red Hat creates social networking site" (May 31, 2006 5:50 PM) -- Ryan Paul, from Ars Technica, on the launch of Mugshot
"Red Hat launches Mugshot project", Jack Schofield (Guardian) -- The announcement on the Guardian's Technology blog
"Ars at FOSSCamp: integrating Internet services into the GNOME desktop", Ryan Paul (Ars Technica) (October 30, 2007 10:12 AM) -- Another article by Ryan Paul at Ars Technica
"GNOME Online Desktop", Havoc Pennington (2007-04-03) -- Havoc goes into detail on the GNOME Online Desktop
"RedHat quietly kills off its Mugshot social networking site", Danny D'Amours (May 29th, 2009) -- Jerry Schuman left a comment on this blog post
"Is Red Hat’s Mugshot.org dead?" /kernel_reloaded/ (May 20, 2009) -- This article mentions Whoisi by Christopher Blizzard

And here are some links I haven't bothered to prettify yet:

To find out more I've e-mailed Bryan Clark and Tweeted Christopher Blizzard.

Here's some links that talk about Mugshot:

http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2008/03/01/friendfeed-is-mugshot-with-community -- A Mugshot user compares the then new FriendFeed to Mugshot. The most striking statement from the blog post: "I think it all boils down to bad marketing/community creation from the Red Hat folk. Mugshot has been around for a substantial amount of time. [...] With Havoc having left to start LiTL, I do wonder if the online desktop, social networking site, Mugshot will continue getting the pushing that it needs.". Mugshot and the Online Desktop could have been the best thing since sliced bread, instead, mostly because almost nobody knew about it it died a quiet death. I wonder how big Personnas is nowadays, compared to say something like Facebook (or maybe even FriendFeed).