Shout Out from Sweden

By Jake • December 11th, 2007 • View Comments

swedishtie.pngJohan “The Killer App” Myrberger has a nice post on AppsLab today. He says some nice things about AppsLab and how we’ve influenced his views of Oracle. This line is classic:

I must admit I don’t know much about Oracle as a company. I know they have a database product, but apparently they do much more.

Proving that we are really too self-involved by half to assume that people know about Oracle and what we do, aside from database. Anyway, Johan’s opinion of Oracle was formed by AppsLab, and from reading, he’s discovered that Oracle has a blogosphere of its own.

This is really refreshing to hear, since I usually challenge what people know about Oracle. I spend time trying to convince people like Dennis, Michael, Vinnie et al that some of us at Oracle are real people who welcome a conversation. I spend time convincing internal people that customers want to hear from them; even if it sounds canned or is bad news, it’s still better than yelling into a canyon.

There are others who do this too, but this is about me.

Anyway, I was surprised that Johan wasn’t an Oracle guy because most people who comment here found us through some Oracle channel. Johan and I follow each other on Twitter, and we are Facebook and Orkut friends. Johan blogs about social media and is sometimes quoted in traditional media in Sweden on New Web topics. I guess I should have connected the dots, but like I said, self-involved.

Aside from being a nice post, this is great example of how New Web makes the world smaller. Johan is a social media expert in Sweden. He now knows what we’re doing around New Web from reading this blog and others about Oracle. How did he find us? Probably through RSS. The content came to him, whereas in Old Web, he would have to find the content.

Another example, Rick Turoczy used TwitterWhere to find Portland Twitterers. TwitterWhere is a sweet mashup tool written in Rails by Matt King that is not at the URL you’d expect. He starts following me, we have coffee, talk shop, and he points me to Marshall Kirkpatrick, another Portlander. Marshall and I had lunch yesterday; he mentions a few people who’d be interested in “The Working Group“. And so on.

I fully expect that due to the Rails following of this blog that Matt’s TwitterWhere will get some traffic and possibly someone will expand on what Matt’s done to do something cool. Hey, maybe we can do something cool by porting to JRuby and adding it to Mix.

New Web has an amazing ripple effect you can trace around the world. We’re living in a 2.0 world people. Here’s to converting weak ties to strong ones.


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  • Jake
    From now on, I will try to remember to call you Johan "The Killer Attitude" Myrberger.

    Sorry about the Working Group call time. We'll need to address that in future calls, with a recording/podcast. I'm not sure what Paul has planned for tomorrow's meeting, recording-wise.
  • johan
    Thanks for the blogback - I finally got around to comment back.

    I guess I have never had the need to look deeper at the Oracle product portfolio - I would probably known more if I had peeked around. On the other hand - how much do you know about the Ericsson product portfolio - without looking for it?

    And when talking about impressions made by a web presence - it is educating to read you summary impression of me :-) It is all true, but gives an interesting insight on how I am (at least partly) perceived. As one example you use "The Killer App" as tag for me - while I'm really pushing the quote "There's *no* killer app - only a killer attitude"

    Anyway - I'm looking forward to the first Working Group call tomorrow, even if the time was a bit bad I will try to call in.
  • Jake
    Hard to believe, but you really remember the ones who don't know that Oracle has a big, old blogosphere.
  • Justin Kestelyn
    To this day, I still meet people who don't know Oracle has a middleware offering, or even packaged apps. The limits of marketing!
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