Our guest blogger, Matt Topper, is a friend of the Lab, an ex-Oracle Ace, turned Oracle employee who always has something to say. He’s currently running the identity management team for Oracle’s National Security group, playing with Collok in his free time to fix the conference experience.
The other day Eddie tweeted that he was [...]
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 hurry.
Big [...]
Insert Twitter post disclaimer here.
I’ve noticed a humorous trend that you can use for a laugh.
People like to rant at Twitter, just check out twistori’s hate feed for samples. The beauty part of Twitter and its many clients is that it provides easy outlet for your frustration. Can’t get a piece of software configured? Flame [...]
Enterprise 2.0 2008 is going on now in Boston, and Oracle is a Diamond level sponsor. So, there are loads of Oracle people attending.
I got a request for Mix metrics on Friday for someone’s session today, so I spent several hours yesterday hacking together SQL queries. Protip: when you scope your next web app, plan [...]
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 ideas and networking, [...]
I’ve decided to start a periodic feature I call AppsLab FAQ, which serves several purposes.
First, it gives me topics to blog when I’m short on ideas, which happens frequently.
Second, it gives me a permanent place to store experiences and lessons learned in a given subject area. So, the next time I get asked the question, [...]
This year is not last year.
Last year, I spent hours talking Web 2.0 to teams in development. Collectively, we probably held 20 or so educational sessions and then a similar number of follow up roundtables to discuss ideas spawned by the first session.
This year, I’ve been spending days collecting requirements of teams that want to [...]
Hard to believe I haven’t blogged about Twitter in a while. Like New Web in general, Twitter has reached that cusp where early adopters are calling it “established” and new people are kicking the tires.
Lots of them.
The recent departure of Blaine Cook, Twitter’s former chief architect, could mean any number of things. Many speculate that [...]
Rich, ENTP and I spent last week fixing some issues in Mix that you may have seen. Suggest a session for OpenWorld has driven steady traffic into Mix, and we’re rushing to fix bugs that people have encountered.
Virtually all of the recent fixes have been around suggest a session, which makes sense because that’ where [...]
If you read here, you’ll know I’m not a fan of the term Enterprise 2.0, at least not when it’s used to refer to Web 2.0 practiced behind the firewall.
I know why people feel the need to differentiate Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0; Web 2.0 suffers from an image problem, i.e. it’s associated with sites [...]
I missed this in last week’s broohaha about Suggest a Session, but you can finally remove members from a group. It’s been a long time coming and requested by many people. Insert your favorite excuse here.
If you are the group owner or an admin, you will now see a “Remove from group” link next to [...]
The whole ‘Lab will be at Web 2.0 Expo next week, April 22-25 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
That’s the same venue as OpenWorld and pretty every other tech conference. In Denver, Paul riffed that he was sick of going to Moscone for conferences, something to the effect of “it’s getting old”. It is [...]
One of the changes we deployed this week to Mix was new icons on profile pages. We replaced the links that used to tell you “Edit your profile”, “Add to network”, “Remove from network” with snazzy, Web 2.0 style icons which showed a pen (for edit), a green plus sign (for add), a red x [...]
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 built [...]
Some of you have already noticed that we released a brand new feature to Mix on Monday, direct messaging.
To use direct messaging, either click the inbox icon in the top right navigation, or click the link in the inbox widget on the front page.
You can only message people in your network of contacts, and the [...]
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 three [...]
Mix is reaching more people now, especially through groups. This is great because we always thought groups would be the best way to draw people into the network and conversation. Implied levels of trust within a group make it easier to engage and provide value to people who ordinarily have no use for social networks [...]
If you missed it, over the weekend, there was quite a testy blog war between Louis Gray and Duncan Riley, ostensibly started by FriendFeed or rather differing opinions of it. Short version: Duncan doesn’t find value, Louis disagrees, obscenities ensue. Makes for a good read.
FriendFeed has been all the rage lately among the usual suspects [...]
Rich and Anthony deployed a few key fixes last week, nothing too bloggable. They were focused on securing private group activity and caching, which was causing some weird behavior. So, rather than blog those, my periodic Mix post this week is more metrics.
As a follow up to my first Fun with Numbers post, I did [...]
Rich and Anthony deployed a boat load of fixes and enhancements to Mix on Friday night.
I might have mentioned before the Mix is going to be used more by internal teams, so we addressed groups with this deployment for the most part.
Some of these are bug fixes that have been needed for a while, so [...]
