Open Source Social Networking with Mugshot
A new project coming from Red Hat’s skunkworks is Mugshot, an open source social networking tool.
Linux.com reviews Mugshot and finds it an effective meta social networking tool with some interesting and unique characteristics.
“Mugshot provides a single entry point to popular social networking tools such as Flickr, Google Reader, Blogger, Digg, del.icio.us, Picasa, YouTube, and others. Your Mugshot account page allows you to easily add Web services for use with your Mugshot page; all you have to do is to provide your account information for each service. Your Mugshot user page then acts as a kind of aggregator that watches the configured services and provides notifications when they are updated. For example, if you specify the URL of your blog, Mugshot will automatically add the recent blog posts to your Mugshot page. Enable and configure your Flickr account, and Mugshot adds your photos to the Mugshot page and provides notifications when you add new photos. If you choose to enable the Digg and del.icio.us services, your Mugshot page will display the articles you dugg and recent bookmarks.”
ClaimID offers a similar service (in some ways), oriented toward consolidating all of your online identities in one place, with fewer of the social networking tools like Mugshot’s “swarm” feature.
Managing multiple social networking site profiles, and claiming and controlling the constellation of online content you’ve made, looks to be a new opportunity for companies to develop new web applications, tools, and services.