RIP Oracle Connect

Blogging and long-form content seem so tedious to me nowadays, but if you’ve read here for a while, you’ll recall that I used to post several times a week.

One of the reasons I’ve kept this blog running in the era of ever-shorter content is that it keeps a historical record of this team’s work and our thoughts. As an emerging technologies team, we know that not all our thinking will make it to daylight, so we use this outlet as a way to leave breadcrumbs for ourselves and others.

One such project, Oracle Connect, died a quiet death a few weeks ago.

Connect and OraTweet had been hosted on a machine we were given in 2008, and IT had been trying to decommission that old relic for years. They finally did a few weeks ago, and while Noel (@noeportugal) is salvaging OraTweet, we have no plans to resurrect Connect.

We’ve been urging people using Connect to move to Oracle Social Network for many years, but even so, it still had a handful of users, most of whom reached it via old links on the corporate intranet that haven’t been updated.

Social networks seem pedestrian now, but in 2007, when Connect was born, they were still relatively new, especially inside corporate firewalls. As far as we could tell, Connect was one of the first handful of such corporate networks, and at its peak, it served a couple hundred thousand pageviews a month. Not bad for a little web app managed by a team of four.

Over the years, Oracle Connect has been profiled in a couple books on enterprise social adoption over the years, Niall Cook’s (@niallcook)  Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work and Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr and Mary Ellen Kassotakis.

Back in 2012, I chronicled the History of Connect, if you’re interested in its genesis and trajectory.

So, RIP Oracle Connect, gone but not forgotten.