1. What is Mugshot?

Mugshot is an open project to create live social experiences around entertainment.

2. What does it do?

Mugshot offers several activities:

• Mugshot Page - Pull together activity from all your online accounts at one place on the web.
• Web Swarm - Share web links with individuals or groups in real time, and get live feedback when people visit those links
• Music Radar - Show off the music you listen to using services like iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music, and others on your web site, blog or MySpace page
• Stacker - Keep track of what your friends are doing online, on the web or live on your desktop.
• Groups - Create public or private groups around shared interests.

3. Why should I care?

• Mugshot adds new live social experiences to existing applications and provides a platform for building new ones
• Mugshot contributes to a leveling of the playing field between commercial and non-commercial content and service providers
• Mugshot is designed for mainstream users, not just techies or IT departments
• Mugshot is 100% open source, including the server and clients

4. What does "open project" mean?

The software that powers Mugshot is 100% open source, including the client and the server.

5. What's a "live social experience"?

Computers today are built around the "desktop" metaphor; documents, filing cabinets, that sort of thing. But today we use computers more for communicating with other people than for processing documents in isolation. Applications such as IM, MySpace, email, Flickr, and so forth show that people are much more interesting than virtual filing cabinets.

With Mugshot, we want to create live social experiences through design centered on people and their activities, not documents and files.

6. What is currently available?

7. What's next?

8. How do I get involved?

9. What is the relationship to existing social networking sites?

Mugshot is intended to work with "social networking" sites, not replace them, and to add new live social experiences to them. For example, Mugshot currently allows users to publish their iTunes song history to their MySpace profile.

Unlike most social networking services, Mugshot is a completely open system -- including the server and client source code.

10. What is the relationship to existing music services and applications?

Mugshot is not a replacement for existing online music services. Instead, it works with existing applications and services to add new live social experiences to them. For example, Mugshot currently allows iTunes users to share play lists with users of other services, and to share play lists in new contexts, such as blogs or social network profile pages.

11. What is the relationship to existing instant messaging services?

Mugshot is not a replacement for existing IM services. Instead, we intend for it to work with existing IM applications and services to deliver new live social experiences.

Mugshot does make use of the industry standard Jabber/XMPP protocol under the hood for real time communications between the server and clients.

12. What is the relationship to online services initiatives such as Microsoft Live and Apple's .Mac?

Mugshot shares some of the aims of these initiatives to integrate web services more deeply into the everyday PC experience.

Rather than developing a new integrated suite of web services tuned to a specific client operating system, Mugshot aims to provide a level playing field for a variety of commercial and non-commercial service providers, and to work with a variety of PC and device platforms.

13. Is the music sharing feature legal?

Mugshot does not transfer music, it just provides pointers to legal commercial and non-commercial service providers where users can obtain music.

14. How does Mugshot relate to Red Hat?

Two of Red Hat's core values are collaboration and freedom. Mugshot is an experiment in applying Red Hat's philosophy of collaboration and freedom to new types of content, beyond software and source code.

15. How does Mugshot benefit Red Hat?

Technology developed in the Mugshot project may be incorporated into current and future Red Hat products and services. For example, Red Hat may incorporate live social experiences into Red Hat's client products, or offer commercial services around future versions of the Mugshot software.

There are not yet any formal plans to incorporate Mugshot into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core distributions.

16. What platforms and services are supported?

The Mugshot client software is currently available for Windows XP and Linux. The Mugshot web site also offers limited support for Apple OS X and other platforms.

The Mugshot client software currently offers integration with Apple iTunes, Yahoo! Music Engine, Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows XP. The open source Rhythmbox music player and Firefox are supported on Linux. Rhapsody is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

We expect to broaden the platform to support other applications and commercial and non-commercial service providers. Because Mugshot is an open source project, outside developers can contribute support for new applications and service providers.

17. What web services does Mugshot use?

Mugshot currently makes use of public web services from AOL, Amazon, Rhapsody, and Yahoo!, but has no formal partnerships with these companies related to this project.

We expect to make use of web services from other service providers and interoperate with other applications in the future.