You may remember my optimistic review of Mugshot a while back. In the six months that have transpired since then, I’ve kept using it, in hopes that the negative aspects I was willing to put up with would get ironed out.
Unfortunately, things haven’t progressed very far at all. In this day and age I find it less and less acceptable for a system like this to not offer (complete) RSS feeds to keep up with the content. Heck, even e-mail notices would be an acceptable alternative, but as of right now, there are still several key parts of the system that you can only see by using the client app or going directly to their site in a browser.
I orginally believed that the saving grace would be its open nature; that some eager developer out there would step in and provide the features that I (and I’m sure others) perceive as “missing”. No luck, unfortunately. Occasionally, I’ve even briefly pondered doing it myself, but the fact is there’s only so much time in the day, and for me, there’s not enough for this. Further, as evidenced by the glacially slow progress of the API, it doesn’t even seem that Red Hat is really behind it all that strongly either.
I’ll still keep my account and check it periodically, but only because there are a few people that post stuff and share links using that system exclusively (at least as far as I can tell) that I want to keep up with. I honestly would have dropped it altogether a while ago if not for that.
But, as I do continue to use it, every time I have to switch over to their app or website directly it stands out in sharp contrast to all the other similar services I don’t have to do that for. Here’s hoping they get better.
PS – maybe someone will see this post and comment, pointing me to a vibrant community of third party apps built to address the stuff that I’m looking for that I just haven’t found yet. Keeping my fingers crossed…