Monthly Archives: August 2007

Find Me at the Office 2.0 Conference

Next week is the Office 2.0 Conference made immortal by their offer of free iphones to all participants. The conference looks to have a good mix of participation and as luck would have it, I’ll be speaking on a panel covering Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration. That session is Friday afternoon, but you can [...]

Why Bans Don’t Work

Effectively immediately, nothing will be banned.
The Summer of Facebook has brought a new list of social network (sorry Mark, social utility) bans, as well as some fuzzy research on the cost of social networking. Some interesting points:

Does anyone really believe that Facebook alone costs the Australian economy $5 billion?
The Sophos study says that 43% of [...]

Driving Innovation, Get It?

Recently, Paul was telling me about a conversation he had with an internal product team about Connect. The conversation went something like this:
Product Manager: We love what you’re doing with Connect, and we want to learn more about it. Are your design documents online?
Paul: We don’t have any design documents.
PM: How did you know [...]

Why Social Networks Don’t Work for Business

Web 2.0 seems to get all the press these days. I kinda feel sorry for its less popular stepchild known as Enterprise 2.0. It smacks of some suit trying so hard to be cool and hip, but alas, we all know that enterprise software will never be the coolest thing around. [...]

All Your (Oracle) Blogs are Belong to Us

So, about a month ago when I released the Oracle Blogs search engine plugins, Carl asked a very valid question. Why can’t I search all the blogs listed at blogs.oracle.com, regardless of whether they are hosted by Oracle or not?

I thought about this, contemplating creating a Custom Google Search Engine and a plugin against that. [...]

Oracle Open World Session Update

Looks like the illustrious events team has locked down session times. If you are interested in our sessions, they are both on Monday. Feel free to include them in your personalized agenda. Here are the details:
Mon. Nov. 12 - 3:15-4:15pm
S292186 Oracle and Web 2.0: Applying the Principles of Social Networks, Collaboration, and [...]

AppsLab on Oracle Techcasts

Justin recently published an interview podcast he did with Paul to the Oracle Techcasts. Have a listen if you want to know where we came from, what we’re doing, or just want to hear what Paul and Justin sound like. Paul already blogged about it, so I’m not adding any value, just boosting Justin’s trackbacks.
Semi-related [...]

Our First Podcast

I was recently asked by Justin Kestlyn of OTN fame to participate in a techcast. It’s a short conversation around AppsLab, our charter and gives some insight into our projects and what we are all about.
Take a listen if interested.
-Paul

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addthis_title = ‘Our+First+Podcast’;
addthis_pub [...]

New Features for Connect Beta

Since we launched Connect alpha about three weeks ago, Rich has been adding new features in stealth mode leading up to our beta release, which should be finished sometime this week. We weren’t promoting the new features, just to see how people adopted them. This gave us a nice viral study, and it pointed out [...]

How to Search Your Reader Feeds

I have returned from the land of home improvement projects to bring you this tasty Monday nugget.
We at AppsLab are all big fans of Google Reader. You can find our OPML files on the About page, if you’re interested. They’re nothing like Scoble’s 600+ feeds, but each of us has a pretty hefty list [...]

Why Facebook Is the Future

"Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle…"

Mmm, bacn

We all know what spam is by now, the digital variety, not the gelatin-coated mystery meat in a tin. The attendees of PodCamp2 in Pittsburgh have coined the term bacn to describe “email you want, but not right now”.
Examples of bacn:

Social network alerts
Electronic bill pay alerts
Basically anything you solicited by providing your email that is [...]

Brake for Geeks

Wow, I read this blog post (via FSJ, with whom I have yet to break up) about a woman’s iPhone-Genius Bar experience and found myself experiencing wide range of emoticons. I mean emotions. It’s off-topic, but then again, what topic do I usually follow?
Read the summary FSJ gives or the full post, then come back [...]

“For Your iPhone Only”

For those Oracle people who come here to read iPhone fodder, I’ve started an internal wiki to collect all the tips and tricks that have surfaced from Oracletes with iPhones. Drop me a note to get the 411.
Rich is still jealous. However, he may be in luck. Paul may be taking AppsLab on the road [...]

Free Ruby Lessons

not sure how good the content is, but sounds like a good idea for new rubyists

jQuery Live

nice event observer for jQuery… might be added to jQuery 1.2 core!!!

From the “Don’t Be Evil” Department

As we all know, Google’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil”. I’m a huge fan of the ideals behind the statement, but I’m also a huge cynic. IMHO, by going public, Google essentially changed the motto to “Let’s not be poor.” Not that all the hardworking Googlers don’t deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.
Since [...]

Nuts to Humor-Free!

This has been a humor-free zone for way too long.
Aside from a lackluster Spot the Hoax, I haven’t posted anything intentionally funny lately. But today, I ran into two gems that I think will make you smile or laugh.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Ftheappslab.com%2F2007%2F08%2F21%2Fnuts-to-humor-free%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Nuts+to+Humor-Free%21′;
addthis_pub [...]

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent.
Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet to [...]

My QuickConnect Card for OpenWorld

Jumping on the bandwagon, I’ve created my very own QuickConnect Card for OOW this year. Eddie and Carl have cards as well.
I think this is the first time we’ve had something like this for OOW, and it seems like a good way to “schedule” ad hoc meetings with people that will be at Moscone.
This [...]