Though we want to keep things cleanly engineered so someone could
replace Mugshot, at the same time using Mugshot is the only practical
way to get things going IMO, for a variety of reasons. Some of the major
ones:
- we need an open source server under the control of the development
community, because web services provided by existing sites and
companies aren't sufficient. We want to use what exists - say
Flickr for photos - but then be able to fill in gaps. So for example,
we had to write our own browser for open source apps at
http://mugshot.org/applications
- it's an admin'd, hosted, clustered application server instance that
has both jsp and xmpp channels, and any server-side function can
be rapidly added to it; doing a new server-side function from scratch
has *a lot* of overhead vs. adding to Mugshot (and also has end user
overhead, e.g. signing up for the new server)
- because it has web-only and Windows versions, social features need
not assume that all my friends use Linux
- the "data model" of the Mugshot "meta social network" or whatever you
want to call it is what we think we want user experience wise, vs.
say a "my contact database" data model. For example, people choose
their own photo and nick, and maintain their own addresses, you don't
have to import or edit these things.
- we already have major functionality slices such as tracking your
friends' photos and feeds, tracking who's listening to what,
partially-complete file sharing, and social application
browsing/installing/launching