Mugshot

2006 - 2009

dead us

red hat's attempt at an open-source social network, a feed that pulled together the music you played and the sites you shared and showed it to people with the same tastes. it never escaped the linux enthusiast crowd while the mainstream feeds were building the same idea for everyone else. red hat let it go quiet in april 2009, and the code lived on for a while as a fork called magnetism.

» see mugshot.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i knew red hat. every computer engineer of my generation knew red hat, the company that turned linux into something a business would pay for. i did not know, until i went looking, that it once tried to run a social network of its own.

mugshot launched in 2006 as an open-source social aggregator, which was an unusual thing for a linux vendor to build. it watched what you did across the web, the tracks you played and the links you posted, and pulled it into one shared feed so people with overlapping tastes could find each other. the whole thing was open source, which fit red hat's identity even when the product did not fit its business.

the problem was reach. mugshot never got much past a core of linux enthusiasts, and the same years brought friendfeed and twitter doing the aggregating feed for a general audience with far more reach and money behind it. a social network for a niche technical crowd was never going to sit comfortably inside a company whose real business was enterprise linux.

~ the dossier ~

Born	2006, Red Hat (Raleigh)
Peak	a small, devoted Linux-enthusiast userbase
Killed	April 2009, taken offline
Lifespan	about 3 years
Made by	Red Hat
Killed by	no traction outside Linux, no fit with an enterprise vendor

~ what it was ~

the idea behind mugshot was ahead of the products that beat it. it treated your scattered web activity as one stream worth sharing, which is more or less what every timeline does now. it also shipped as open source, so anyone could read how it worked and run their own. that openness is the reason a piece of it survived, forked into a project called magnetism after the main site went dark.

~ the day it died ~

there was no announcement. sometime in april 2009 mugshot.org started answering with a flat line, mugshot is currently not running, and by may the address just redirected to redhat.com. red hat never formally confirmed that it was dead, which is its own kind of confirmation. the code outlived the service, which is close to the most a project like this can hope for.

~ leave a rose ~

an anonymous tribute. one rose per visitor per day.

@}-->-- ... roses left here

@}-->--

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~ leave a wreath ~

a rose fades by morning. a wreath stays on this grave for good, with your name on it.

paid once through stripe. payments are handled by OÜ Lakeview, the small company that keeps rip.so running. the money pays for the hosting and the nightly digging. adopt it and the headstone reads "maintained in memory by" you. the groundskeeper plants new wreaths at the next tending, usually within a day.

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~ leave a note ~

visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.

other social: Facebook Rooms, Yookos, Find Your FaceMate, Brightkite

also died in the 2000s: ConnectU, I Am Rich, SAPARi

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