There’s a point at which a service on the web becomes fun and useful. With “social networking sites” it’s usually that point at which enough of your friends are using something it and it lets you connect in a unique way. If you’re into stalking old high school girl friends it’s facebook, or if you like telling people what you’ve having for breakfast it’s twitter or if you’re just into bizarro nearly soft core teen created web pages and obscure music then myspace is your drug of choice.
But for me, mugshot has gotten to that point. I think that it’s best illustrated by a screenshot of the stacker on my desktop:
What I really like about that image is that it shows all my friends chatting about the posts that people are making and some comments in the chat activity for the Red Hat Summit 2007 group. You can see the movie I’m getting from Netflix (and so can all my friends – and, no, I’ve never seen Shaun of the Dead) and there’s a bunch of other random stuff in there. The most common stuff in my stacker these days is from the I Can Has Cheezburger group because cats + macros are the lulz.
I think that they key to making mugshot more relevant to people is to start exporting all of the great stuff that people are making. If people are chatting about your web log post, why can’t it show up in your web blog? That wouldn’t be too hard to do and would bring a real “live” feeling to web log comments – something that doesn’t exist today. Also the vast majority of my friends use macs. We really really need a mac client. A couple of my friends have just set mugshot as their home page as it’s the only way they can get a constant feed of my lol-inducing links. Of course, it is open source through and through so someone could easily work on a mac client.
In any case, it certainly has reached critical mass for me. What’s your tipping point?
Are you sure you’re not mistaking “critical mass” for “me making a bad habit of quip whoring on every Blizzard mugshot”? :-D
If only it was available in the Ubuntu repositories. I feel left out.
I missed Sean of the Dead, but Shaun of the Dead wasn’t bad…
Can’t you add it to the Ubuntu repository? I thought they had “universe.”
Snarky! Fixed the Sean/Shaun. Thanks, I think.