The AppsLab

I mentioned a few weeks ago that OraTweet, Noel’s mirco-blogging package built in APEX, would soon be released to the public after he made some tweaks to get it production-ready.

Today, he unveiled it. You can download OraTweet here.

It’s provided free of charge, as-is, and requires Oracle 10g or 11g and APEX 3.1.x or higher. Oracle XE has not been tested, but Noel says it should work. Matt has confirmed that XE does work, with the addition of a script to load the images into the db.

What do you get?

OraTweet provides you with everything you need to start micro-blogging inside the firewall (or anywhere really). The web front-end is built in APEX, and you can plug in IM/SMS integration. The API allows you to build native and RIA clients (think Adobe AIR) as well. It’s all in there, pretty much everything you’d expect, including the ability to post to Twitter.

Noel also built server-side groups into OraTweet. So, you can create an OraTweet group and anyone following the group will see tweets @ that particular group. We have an @AppsLab group that we all follow, so tweets @AppsLab appear in my timeline. No need to tweet @ each of us individually, which would eat a lot of characters.

This type of grouping is useful if you have a team or a project with many members. Groups are lightweight, easy to create, follow and delete, which helps when you have an ad-hoc project or a unit of work to complete as a team.

Client-side grouping can be built using the API, similar to how clients like TweetDeck allow you to group your tweets.

OraTweet also keeps micro-blogging public. There are no privacy settings to protect your updates. This is by design, since OraTweet grew up as a way to communicate outside email and IM, both of which support peer-to-peer privacy. Noel also didn’t build in direct messaging because it seemed like overkill, since we all have inboxes already.

I’m excited for Noel. His little side-project, started about a year ago, has seen heavy viral adoption inside the firewall. People are uncovering new uses for OraTweet every day.

So, head over to oratweet.com, give a test drive, let us know what you think in comments, including your use cases.

As promised, here’s the riveting second installment of my sort-of recap from WebVisions last week.

On Friday last week, I went to the OpenID panel discussion, hosted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and starring Scott Kveton, vice-chair of the OpenID foundation board of directors and bacon enthusiast, Chris Messina, community advocate for OpenID, OAuth, and open web in general, and my pal Rick Turoczy, local OpenID wonk.

Dave Recordan, who was scheduled to be on the panel, had to bail early, so Rick stepped in to take his place, a fact I teased him about mercilessly at lunch before the panel.

Rick is no OpenID slouch though. He has covered OpenID and open web for several years, and not just as they relate to the Pacific Northwest. Still, it was fun to tease him. Read More »

Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the 2009 iteration of WebVisions, a conference held here in Portland focused on the future of web design and development.

As with last year, my goal for attending was to gain new design perspectives. Web design is constantly evolving, and we use many of the innovations present on the consumer web internally in Connect. Rich is the primary design force on our team, and I like to broaden my knowledge of what’s out there to add balance to what he knows and likes to do.

Interface design is highly opinionated, so it’s always helpful to have a wider range of opinions from which to choose.

I haven’t been to any conferences since Defrag last November, but I can tell from reading that conferences have changed. WebVisions was no different. There was a distinct emphasis on social media (ahem, Twitter) not present last year.

I started on a daily recap, but I’m not sure that’s valuable.

Instead, I’ll focus on the two sessions I found most interesting: “Future of Mobile: Native Apps vs. Mobile Web vs. Hybrid Apps” and “OpenID: The Panel Discussion“. Read More »

First off, thanks for hanging in there while I caught up on my R&R.

I came back today to hear the happy news that OraTweet will soon be available to anyone who wants to give it whirl. Noel is prepping the final package for distribution, but if you’re interested now, head over to oratweet.com and sign up to be notified when it’s ready.

The distribution requires APEX and Oracle DB, natch. APEX is a very active community, and I’m sure people like Chet and Dimitri Gielis will be chomping at the bit to get their hands on it.

I’m really stoked to see OraTweet released into the world for several reasons.

First and foremost, it’s just the “side project turned mission-critical application” story I love. Yes, believe it or not some teams here other than ours use micro-blogging for daily operational work. We have lots of internal use cases that Noel plans to share on oratweet.com.

We’re not the only ones. Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting covered Oracle and OraTweet, among other enterprises using micro-blogging for work, in her whitepaper “Enterprise Micro-Sharing“.

Stories like OraTweet are common, e.g. ESME, a project fostered in the SDN, was launched about the same time OraTweet went live in June of last year.

Some people are surprised that Oracle has a micro-blogging application at all.

If you read here, you know we have a soft spot for internal innovation like Connect, which is integrated with OraTweet today. We have big plans to build out a tighter integration that will link OraTweet and Connect groups, allowing people to interact with Connect directly from OraTweet and vice versa from email, SMS and IM.

Let’s not forgot Clayton’s Oracle People iPhone app, which adds another way for people to use Connect and OraTweet. Read More »

Third installment, you’re past halfway there now. I know you miss me. I’m probably jonesing for the ‘tubes right now. Enjoy.

Here’s the archive from November 2007.

• Talk the Talk: Even if they got it wrong, CSI was at least a year ahead of the curve with the Twitter reference. You can’t turn on the TV without getting one lately. Funny window into the past.
• Mix, JRuby on Rails, Small Teams, Agile, and it’s Effects on the World: An oldie but goodie from Rich, and incidentally, happy third birthday JRuby.
• Back from OpenWorld: Interesting in retrospect, all the tweeting and accidental meetups we had through Twitter.
• Let’s Mix and Mix is Live: Two for one here, celebrating the launch of Mix, still (I think) the largest production JRuby app on the ‘tubes.
• More OpenWorld Blogger Updates: Ah memories, the teapot tempest revisited.

It’s almost over, hang in there and talk among yourselves.

So, I’m headed off the grid for a while. In my absence, I figured I’d keep the content fresh by recycling some old stuff.

A bit ironic, but bear with me. Blogging for me is very tied to what’s happening right now.

We’ve been around for a little over two years now, but it seems like a lot longer. So, I thought it might be interesting to take a stroll down memory lane and reminisce on posts from the past.

As a bonus, the automagically generated, possible related posts may dig up some other new-old content you might enjoy.

Maybe you’ll get lucky, and one of my esteemed colleagues will blog in my absence.

Enjoy.

Here’s the archive from November 2008, a mere six months ago Feels like an eternity, looking over the posts.

A couple jump out as interesting.

• Defrag08 Presentation: Paul’s presentation a Defrag 08 includes some interesting analysis of the Connect and Mix communities. Check out his slides.
• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM: Even though I struggle to adopt FriendFeed as a part of my daily routine, I love what they’re doing, especially the functionality and their design. I’ve seen an increase in people subscribing to my feed lately, so maybe they’re making headway. Hope so.
• How to Do a Set-Top Box: This one was a funny study in how to get comments. People love their TiVos.
• “Looks Good, Works Well”: A rare, but interesting post, from Rich, this one covers some great design principles. Design is always fun to discuss because it’s 1% functionality and 99% opinion. Or something like that.
• Let’s Take a Legal Break: I’m fascinated and sometimes horrified by the legal precedent the courts are setting around technical issues. Maybe the new administration will address this with a technical education office or something.

Talk among yourselves.

Image by Banalities on Flickr used under Creative Commons (thx @jpiwowar)

As I mentioned last week, we’ve released the 4.0 version of Connect, which includes a boat-load of new stuff.

Our main goals for this release were:

• Put the focus on people, not on objects.
• Make it dead simple to share anything.
• Aggregate information by supporting multiple sources.
• Provide intelligent filtering for easy viewing.
• Consolidate output of the information we aggregate.
• Give groups a more independent experience.

These grew out of a few itches we wanted to scratch: aggregation, easy sharing, better groups. Plus, while they were at it, Rich and Anthony cleaned up the code, significantly re-architected the data model and stretched their UI legs a bit with some sweet AJAX goodness.

For those of you still reading who aren’t employees and can’t check it out for yourselves, Connect had been very similar to Mix in functionality if you need a baseline.

I’ll cover each of our goals in turn. Read More »

Well, our big redesign of Connect, version 4.0, is finally live. Anthony and Rich are knocking out some final issues, but we cut over earlier this afternoon.

Luckily, it’s the weekend. So, our users aren’t using right now.

Unluckily, it’s the weekend, and everyone on the team has plans.

Next week, I’ll fill you in on the new stuff. So, tune in or out, depending on your interest level.

This is by far our biggest release, probably larger than when we switched to the Mix JRuby code line last Summer. Connect is just under two years old. Born in June 2007 as the IdeaFactory, we’ve managed to iteration four times, and the feature set is surprisingly large.

I’m continually impressed with Rich and Anthony’s ability to accomplish so much with so little.

As we realized this week, we’ve set the bar very high, and now that we have a lot of users, we have to move away from the startup mentality a bit and plan more.

For perspective, last June, when we switched to the JRuby code base, Connect had about 36,000 pageviews from 3,000 odd users. We’ve served 40,000 pageviews this week to just over 2,800 users, and Connect was down for about 12 hours while we tested the production migration.

Lately, a typical week would have topped the numbers for all of June 2008 and then some. Read More »

Photo by Hugo90 on Flickr used under Creative Commons

I started this post before the New Year, and it sat in drafts for a long time.

It was never meant to be a prediction post, so the title makes it feel a bit funny. Still, I kept it because this year, the side project seems more common than ever.

Maybe it’s a function of Portland or maybe a function of the geeky crowd with which I associate, but it seems like everyone has so many side projects, that you wonder about their front one (or ones).

As an example, Shizzow started out as a side project for a handful of good people I know here in Portland. They all had full-time gigs (some still do), and Shizzow was a pet project they hoped would take shape. It has (and is awesome), and having at least one side project seems to be the norm, not the exception.

Take my pal Rick, who has about 8,000 different ventures going at any given time, including the Silicon Florist, in addition to his family and his front project that pays the bills.

Rich, Paul and Matt are the same way. So am I. Read More »