If you are a Facebook user, you can now show off your Mugshot in your Facebook profile!

Once you add the new Mugshot application, you are taken to the Mugshot application page which has the following form.

If you already added your Facebook account on Mugshot, we will immediately recognize you and populate the form with all the sites you use. You don’t need to submit the form if you don’t want to make any changes, just go directly to your profile and check out your Mugshot there.

If you have a Mugshot account, but we didn’t know your Facebook account beforehand, you can click “Verify My Mugshot Account” button, and we will match up your Mugshot account with your Facebook account. Once that happens, your latest activity from Mugshot will show up in your profile.

If you are new to Mugshot, you can fill out your account details directly within Facebook. Mugshot will collect your latest activity and display it in your Facebook profile. You’ll always be able to enable the full features of your Mugshot account, including a public page, by clicking “Create My Mugshot Account” button.

The next few things we need to do are add an invitation form for the application on Facebook and have the updates about your Mugshot activity show up in your friends’ news feed. We are also planning to display thumbnails for your photo and video accounts and possibly show more information for each update. We could also tell you who else among your Facebook friends has a Mugshot account and help you add them as Mugshot friends, making your Stacker even more fun! Let us know if you have other ideas!

With this latest push, we’ve completed an overhaul of the Mugshot framer design. There have been lots of improvements to the framer with this redesign, it’s much cleaner and simpler. Take a look.

The from section of the framer is a new layout that shows who’s actively around the link right now. There also have been lots of subtle improvements to the text alignment and sizes to make sure we can show you as much of the description and other information as allowed by the size of the framer.

The quip and chat section of the framer is completely new. It now allows you to write a single quip at a time with out opening the chat window. Just click on the standard “Quip - I Love it - I Hate it” widget to get a mini quip window. And you can always open up the chat with the All Quips link to join the chat like usual.

Take a look at the screenshot below for the whole thing in action.

And it’s called Amazon support!

Amazon is a favorite shopping site of ours. It has all the books, CDs, cameras, cookware, and more we could imagine. Yet Amazon also has excellent reviews on their products, with a vibrant community of people contributing to new products everyday. However as usual in Mugshot we’re most interested in what the people we know are saying about products on Amazon, despite it being helpful to read what the people we don’t know think of a product as well.

You may have already seen an Amazon block of a friend go by so here’s the breakdown of things from your Amazon account that can be in your Mugshot profile.

• Your Amazon Profile page (you might not have even known you had one)
• Your Amazon Wish List
• Your Amazon Reviews

You Mugshot friends will now get updates when you review a product on Amazon or when you add a new item to your wish list. And your Amazon profile page will be shown on your account ribbon along with your other accounts displayed on your Mugshot page. Just go to your Mugshot Account page to add your Amazon account.

The Amazon support really shows how Mugshot can make an existing system more fun for you and your friends. You’ll be able to see what others are reviewing and instantly quip on those reviews! You could also see a new item in a friends wish list and jump to the page where you can buy it for them. None of us here at Mugshot Headquarters really realized how much others were using Amazon already until we started seeing new wish list and review blocks passing by.

Enjoy!

With our latest update of Mugshot, you might have noticed there is a new type of group, freeing you from the restrictions of invite-only groups. But we’ve been busy with other stuff too!

Previously, you could only quip on music radar blocks and feed blocks from groups.

 

But now we’ve added in Quips for personal blog blocks.

 

As well as for other personal external accounts like Digg, Reddit, and Photo blocks.

 

The quips control is available in the expanded view of any block.

 

While we were working on it, we also made sure quipping from the web site works just as well as it does from the mugshot download. You can now access the quick quips control and the chat window from the web site just as you’ve always been able to from the client. Have fun!

We noticed that having followers did not work equally well for all public groups. Some groups had followers and nobody there to invite them (Australia, World of Warcraft Users). Other groups seemed to have an unstated policy of inviting all followers (Fedora, Cooking). Why were we making people click on all those “Invite to group” links? Only for a few groups did having followers seem necessary (Red Hat, Mugshot Team).

We’ve now added an option for public groups to have open membership that allows anyone to join the group directly, without the “follower” step. This option can be selected when creating a public group or on the group edit page. Changing a group that has followers to an “Open” group will invite the followers (only one notification about the change will be sent out, not one for every invited follower).

We’ve converted many groups on Mugshot to have an open membership policy as it seemed to be a better fit for what they were about. Feel free to adjust the membership policies of the groups you are in or chat with other group members about what policy is best for your group in the group chat!

To make the pages that display group activity more interesting, group membership activity will no longer be included in a group’s Mugshot. It will still be included in a group’s Stacker and be sent out to the group members.

Or really, just faster and smarter. Along with a number of fixes over the past few days, we’ve improved the way we check for updates to your account sites like Twitter, Last.fm, and Netflix. Previously, a change such as a new blog entry or twitter update might have only been seen once an hour. Now, it should be at most at 30 minutes before changes are seen.

In addition, we are now a bit smarter about how we check for updates - once you do make a change, we start checking more often for a period of time. This should more closely match “burst” updates like Last.fm play history where you will listen to music for a while and your history will change rapidly, or if you send a lot of Twitter updates in a row.

We have some more tricks in the works, but we hope this helps make your Mugshot feel a bit faster!

Mugshot.org now supports adding your Picasa and Google Reader accounts. If you share public albums on Picasa, they will show up where your friends can see them. For Google Reader, if you share an item, your friends will see it in their Mugshot Stacker - this should make Google Reader shared items much more useful.

As always, add ideas for other services we should support to this page and if you’re a developer, we’d love to help you add your favorite service (to get started, check out these instructions).

There are so many different choices available for applications in Open Source and Free Software. While having all these choices shows how diverse and talented the community is it often makes you wonder… With all these choices, what is the best choice? And while it’s hard to say what the best choice is since the answer is often so unique to each person, we’ve been working to provide an answer that we think helps satisfy part of the question.

What applications are people using? Our question is that in the sea of free software applications available, which ones are people actually using? We’re aren’t interested in which applications people have installed on their system or the one they rate with 5 stars, but which applications are people running on a daily basis.

Check out the Application Usage Statistics page for our initial attempt at satisfying that question.

We created a system that allows people to share what types of applications they use. Now this doesn’t watch what people are doing inside those applications, the information is strictly about the type of application, like is it Firefox or Thunderbird. Every so often the mugshot client sends that data to be calculated into our popularity ranking.

The usage data is anonymous, you can read more about the details here.  And sorry, but right now this is for Linux only.  If you’re interested in what else could be done with this please send a message to the mugshot list or start chatting on the Mugshot Community group.

In our recent Quips and Comments release we included support for Netflix updates in your Mugshot. Now if you’re a Netflix customer you can include your movies as a part of your Mugshot Account.

Mugshot will let your friends know when you receive a new DVD at home by watching your “Movies At Home” list. With the arrival of a new DVD Mugshot sends a stacker block like this one below which has shows your Movie Title, Cover, and Description. We’ve also included the next 5 movies in your movie queue when you expand the block.

So try it out! It’s really simple to get started, goto your Netflix Personal Feeds and copy the Movies At Home URL. You’ll need to be logged into Netflix to see your Personal Feeds and it should similar to the image below.

Then goto your mugshot account and select Love for Netflix, pasting in the URL you just copied. Press the Save button and you’re done! Now you and your friends can keep up with the Movies you like.

We’ve pushed a new release out tonight in anticipation of FUDcon. The big change in this release is a rework of how we handle “chatting”.

• You can now “Quip” about a web swarm or group chat right from the stacker, without having to open up the chat window. (This ability was added only for Music in the last release.).
• On the other hand, you can now open up a chat window for Music, if you want to have a more extended conversation.
• On both Linux and Windows we now use an HTML based chat window. (A huge improvement over the old text-control based Linux chat window)
• The HTML chat window, now called “Quips and Comments”, has been simplified and cleaned up, so it’s more functional and less funky.

Another change in this release is that we now have Firefox support on Windows as well as Linux. The Mugshot Firefox extension basically does two things - it adds a toolbar icon to share web pages via Mugshot web swarm, and it offers hook so that the mugshot.org web pages can show live preview of chat. Since we now work as nicely in Firefox as in Internet Explorer, we were able to go ahead and make another change people have been asking for a lot: when you click on links in the Mugshot stacker, they now open in your default browser, rather than always in IE.

We’ve also added one more feature that that in a perfect world nobody will use: if the Windows client crashes, the user is now offered the ability to upload information about the crash to our server. (The crash dumps are collected using Google Airbag, which rocks.)

Oh, yeah, I should mention that we now support Netflix, so you see what movies your friends are getting in the mail, and arrange movie nights or just ask them for their opinion. It’s also a useful way of tracking the status of your own queue without having to check your email.

If you are a Mugshot user, when you clicked through on the signup or invitation email, you probably saw something like:

and thought: what the heck am I supposed to do here? And what is this Mugshot thing anyways? We’ve made some changes to the signup process to make things smoother and more obvious. Now, when you click on the invitation mail, you are taken directly to the Account page, and see a message at the top like:

You can immediately agree to the terms of use, and we think most people will do that. But you can also explore the site and get some of idea of how it works. Once you are ready and agree to the terms of use, the terms of use message goes away and is replaced with a message about the download:

Again the idea is to remove a blocking step; you can download immediately, but you can also instead fill out the information in your account profile and get some idea about what Mugshot does before you choose to install the client software. The download message stays around until you are ready to download. (If you close the message, then we remember that and don’t display it again.)

The other change in this release is intended to address some comments we got about the “wiki” style editing of groups. While we didn’t want to add heavy-weight moderation and an idea of group “ownership”, there is certainly a need for being able to find out who made changes and discuss them. So, as a first step, when one of the members changes a group you are in, you get a notification that looks like:

You can then discuss it with them in the group chat, or if you are in a combative mood, just revert the change. It may be that for some groups we’ll need something more structured, but we want to see how this works out first.

Happy 2007! Why not kick off the new year on the right foot with a resolution to stay in touch with your friends and family with Mugshot?

To make it easier to spread the word, we’ve put together a Mugshot Buttons page that has links to a variety of Mugshot logos, badges and buttons you can sprinkle across your home page, profile pages, and blog. We’ve included tips about how to add those logos to Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, TypePad, Wordpress, and Yahoo! Mail.

If you’d like to show a summary of your actual Mugshot activity right in your home page or blog, you also have the option to use Mini Mugshot, which launched just before the holidays.

And of course, once you have a Mugshot account you can easily invite your friends to join via email.

Remember, Mugshot is about people you know and their activities on the web, so it works best when your friends are on board. Why not spread the word in 2007?

Another feature introduced in our recent holiday release of Mugshot is an updated look and feel for Music Radar notifications.

With the new design, you’ll notice that there’s a lot more to do with Music Radar blocks, both on the web site and with the enhanced experience provided by the Mugshot software for your PC.

Music Radar now includes album art for the most recently played track. If you expand the block by clicking on it, you’ll also see a history of the last few songs played by that individual. And Mugshot automatically provides links to play the song through various online music services including iTunes, Yahoo! Music, and Rhapsody.

Best of all, you don’t just have to sit there and take it any more when your friends listen to awful tracks. With the Mugshot software installed, you now have the option to make a quick comment or “quip” to let them know whether or not you’re a fan. Your quip will be instantly visible to anyone who sees that song block, so others can pile on as well. How’s that for the user-generated content?

A little while back we released a Mini Mugshot badge so you could put a little piece of your Mugshot whereever you are on the web, such as on your blog sidebar or your MySpace page. Since the release of those badges, we’ve had a number of people request a mini mugshot for their blogs that isn’t flash based.

So now we’re working out a prototype version of our HTML Mini Mugshot. If you’d like to try it out, point your browser to http://mugshot.org/user-summary. Make sure to leave comments here and let us know what you think.

To put this prototype in your blog you’re going to need access to the HTML of your blog (this doesn’t work in MySpace, sorry!). Look at your buttons page for instructions that will work for several popular sites. Once you have access to your blog’s raw HTML, paste in the following code where you’d like your mugshot badge to appear.

<iframe src="http://mugshot.org/user-summary?who=REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_ID"
width="200px" height="400px"
frameborder="0"
marginwidth="2px" marginheight="2px"></iframe>

Remember to replace the REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_ID with your actual Mugshot ID. You can find this ID by going to your user summary while logged in. The page will forward you to your own user summary if you just go the the page with out any parameters. Copy the entire user-summary URL you see into the iframe href attribute.

Feel free to play with all of the the attributes of the iframe, like width and height, to adjust it to fit your page. The 200px and 400px are defaults that will work for most pages, but you may want to customize it to your site’s needs.

If you’re looking for an even more low-fi version of these badges, we also have a Javascript Where I’m At option as yet another way to list your Mugshot accounts on your blog.

Update: The HTML above was mangled by WordPress to say mce_src=”…” xsrc=”…” rather than a single src=”..”, I’ve tried to fix it, but if it’s still mangled, you’ll need to correct the problem yourself. - Owen. (Pointed out by Trond Danielsen … thanks!)

If you use Google’s Personalized Home Page, you might want to check out the new Mugshot Stacker in Google Gadget form. It isn’t nearly as fancy as the Mugshot desktop application but it gets the job done and shows you the same list of items you’d see on the bottom portion of your Mugshot home page or in the desktop version of Mugshot Stacker.

To add the Google Gadget just go here and click on the “add to Google” button. There’s also a link on that page to get HTML code for adding the stacker gadget to an arbitrary web page, not just your Google home page.

The Mugshot stacker gadget has a couple of limitations right now. Internet Explorer 7 (and possibly 6) will block the Mugshot login cookie by default, which means the gadget can’t get your stack from the server. Safari may also block the cookie. It works with current versions of Firefox, however, and may work with Internet Explorer if you manually change your cookie policy so the gadget can log in to Mugshot.

The stacker is a “universal gadget” which means you can add it to both your desktop sidebar and your personalized home page. However, the gadget does not reload itself right now, so when using it on the desktop sidebar it won’t update frequently enough. We’ll try to fix this soon.

Please add comments if you have any problems with or suggestions for the gadget.