Why OpenSocial Matters and How it’s Good for You

Published on August 20th, 2008 6 Comments

I’ve been drilling OpenSocial for most of the year, talking about why our platforms (Mix and Connect) will be containers, explaining how it’s good for users and even better for developers. Now, I have a couple examples that should stick. Ed commented on my last mockups post: OpenSocial is now officially my new latest favourite [...]

More Connect Mockups

Published on August 14th, 2008 10 Comments

Rich has finished a few more mockups of the changes we’re making to support OpenSocial. Since our last episode, he’s finished the Profile page. Take a look. One thing (other than location data, which will return soon, promise) people have been missing since we upgraded Connect to the Mix JRuby code line is status. More [...]

Another Call for OpenSocial App Thoughts

Published on August 5th, 2008 4 Comments

Last week, I asked you what OpenSocial apps you’d like to see in the Connect (and eventually Mix) app directory. Which seeded apps? Any apps you’d like to build or see built? And generally, are you stoked about OpenSocial apps? Not much in the comments, but somehow, I think there’s interest out there. OpenSocial is [...]

More Connect UI Mockups, Do You Care?

Published on August 4th, 2008 6 Comments

If you’ve been away, welcome back, and by the way, I’ve been blogging our design process for the changes we need to make to support OpenSocial in Connect. Today, Rich posted a few new mockups today of his vision for our Connect (and ultimately, Mix) OpenSocial UI. The first mockup shows Rich’s vision for the [...]

Light the App Bar or Not?

Published on July 30th, 2008 6 Comments

So, I promised to blog Rich’s UI mockups for the OpenSocial UI changes we’re planning, and even though posts about what we actually do here at the ‘Lab get way less traffic and comments than fun posts about which O/S would win in a fight, I’m keeping that promise. Rich has made a lot of [...]

What OpenSocial Apps Do You Want?

Published on July 28th, 2008 7 Comments

So, as I mentioned last week, we’re putting the finishing touches on the OpenSocial work for Connect. The OpenSocial container is finished and ready for app development right now. We just need to add an app directory and tweak the profile and home pages to accept OpenSocial apps. One line item on our development plan [...]

Transparent Development? We Has It.

Published on July 25th, 2008 7 Comments

You may have noticed more talk about what we’re doing and why lately. Comments are down, so either this is exceedingly dull to you, or you completely agree and have nothing to add. Either way, as we move forward with our plan to deploy Connect as an OpenSocial container and update the UI to support [...]

Mix Updates and New Features

Published on July 25th, 2008 Leave a Comment

Recently, even though we’ve been focusing on Connect and OpenSocial, but Mix hasn’t been standing still. ENTP has been working to fix bugs and build features for Marketing that will be showcased heading into OpenWorld. Last night, a slew of bug fixes and a new feature or two were deployed to Mix. If you’re a [...]

On OraTweet and OpenSocial

Published on July 24th, 2008 4 Comments

So, Noel Portugal is at it again. He has expanded his pet project, OraTweet, to include OraTweetBot, which he says is: . . . an XMPP/Jabber bot built with Java that will listen for tweets and post them to Twitter or to a database. I never use the XMPP/IM Twitter integration, but I know it’s [...]

Big Changes are Afoot

Published on July 21st, 2008 Leave a Comment

I spent the day today with my AppsLab brethren sequestered like a jury in the Thunderball conference room in sunny Pleasanton, CA. Or maybe it’s Dublin. Anyway, Paul called us all together to hunker down on some design work. Well, some new design and some redesign. If you’re interested in the future of the Connect [...]

Connect as a Blogging Tool

Published on July 15th, 2008 Leave a Comment

Since we started down this road last year launching Connect to go with the IdeaFactory, one common ask has been blogs. Blogs are a cornerstone of Web 2.0, allowing anyone to publish content and anyone to participate. We discussed very early on whether we should provide a blogging platform, like multi-user WordPress or MoveableType, for [...]

Groups are Grrrreat

Published on July 9th, 2008 4 Comments

Connect has been live for several weeks now. We spent only a few days running it concurrently with original Connect, and then Rich slapped redirects in place for the old URLs. It didn’t make much sense to maintain two instances Traffic, which had dwindled significantly has ramped back up to between 13-15,000 pageviews each week. [...]

Connect V2 is Live

Published on June 20th, 2008 9 Comments

I’m stoked to announce that we’ve opened our latest version of Connect, the internal community for employees, for beta testing. If you’re an employee, find me through email or otherwise, and I’ll get you the URL. We’ll be redirecting all traffic from the old version of Connect very soon, in case you’re not in a [...]

Play Name the Platform

Published on June 9th, 2008 22 Comments

If you read here, you’ll know the ‘Lab’s history. If you don’t or you’re a new reader, here’s the quick skinny: In June, we launched IdeaFactory to collect ideas inside the firewall. In August, we added social networking to ideas inside the firewall and called it Connect. In November, we added groups and questions to [...]

OpenSocial’izing Our Apps

Published on April 17th, 2008 Leave a Comment

Now that Jake has exposed our next venture, I thought I’d flesh out some more details on what we hope to accomplish by building our own OpenSocial container.  When OpenSocial came out, it all took us AppsLab’ers by surprise that Oracle was a founding member.  It wasn’t really a surprise that Google was building something [...]

What’s Next?

Published on April 17th, 2008 4 Comments

Lately, our plans have started coming into focus. If you read here, you probably know we built Mix with ThoughtWorks back in November. Since January, Marketing has been making plans to use Mix a lot more heavily, starting with this year’s Openworld. Yesterday, I told you about the project and the new direct messaging feature [...]

AppsLab: Year One

Published on April 9th, 2008 11 Comments

A year ago was my first day at AppsLab. Paul and I huddled (virtually) to talk about plans for the team. It was exciting stuff. We had a unique opportunity to operate like a startup within the bowels of a huge corporation. We had simple plans that I used a mnemonic device to remember, the [...]

It’s That Time of Year

Published on December 31st, 2007 Leave a Comment

To usher out 2007, it’s time to do the retrospective. Cue the music. Looking back on this past year elicits “wow” moments for me. This time last year, I worked in a different team, Fusion Financials Strategy; I was neck-deep in the requirements for Secure Enterprise Search integration into Apps. I lived in a different [...]

How Do You Do Enterprise 2.0?

Published on December 12th, 2007 17 Comments

Craig Cmehil, Ethan Jewett and I had an interesting conversation (over Twitter, natch) earlier today about demand for New Web tools like Twitter, social networking, social bookmarking inside the firewall. Twitter’s 140 character limitation sometimes leads to convolution, but I think the core question was how do you approach internal demand for these tools? From [...]

The OpenLab

Published on October 29th, 2007 9 Comments

When we started our Connect experiment in August, one goal we had for the project was to engage the tens of thousands of technical folks at Oracle in something new. We call it OpenLab, and it’s run like an Open Source project within Oracle. The only thing we ask participants to do is use free [...]

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