Red Hat creates social network for geeks

Stan Beer
Friday, 02 June 2006 12:15

Your IT - Home IT

Some may think that about the last thing you would expect to come out of the development labs of Linux vendor Red Hat is a social networking site for geeks. However, when you think about it, Linux forums are basically primitive and narrowly focussed social networking sites. Red Hat's Mugshot, however, is something quite different.

With the open-source Mugshot project, Red Hat is in the process of creating of social network centred around the interests of geeks. These would be the sort of people who would also visit Linux forums to get help with the latest issue they have with getting their wireless network to run with the Fedora Core 5 Linux distribution. Except Mugshot is not concerned with their technological interests. Instead, it wants them to share their interests in music, cool web links and, soon, TV shows.

Red Hat denies a couple of the assertions made in the last paragraph. Firstly, the company claims Mugshot is aimed at mainstream users not tech heads. Secondly, it claims not to be a social network like, say, MySpace. The short answer to both of those two claims is we beg to differ.

Red Hat is not exactly what you would call a mainstream consumer household name. If someone knows who the company is and what it sells then the chances are that they have something to do with information technology, whether at work or play. Secondly, if inviting people to gather together online in order to share similar interests isn't social networking then what is?

In fact, Red Hat wants to play down any comparisons or suggestions of competition with MySpace and one can hardly blame the company for that. MySpace is at the pinnacle of online social networks, with 80 million members and mainstream appeal. Mugshot is an embryonic open source work in progress that is far from complete and is as yet available to only a select group of invited members.

One thing about Mugshot, however, is that because it is an open source project, it is likely gather new features and a tech head following from the development community very quickly. In short, it will be a site frequented by geeks, developed by geeks and appealing to geeks. But hey, there's millions of geeks in the world, so why shouldn't they have  their own social networking site?