We joined the WebCenter development team back in late September of last year, and since then, one of our major projects has been redesigning the internal WebCenter 11g instance used by employees. I’m happy to report that our first round of changes went live on Monday. More on that in a minute. Coincidentally, the latest… Read More
In an IM conversation I had with Paul this morning, I decided to embark on an experiment. I’ve decided to drop out of all things social (online) for a few weeks. This includes Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, blogging, etc. The only thing this doesn’t include is email and IM — those are essential. My online activities… Read More
Cue the jokes. So, Chet (@oraclenerd) floated this notion, originally proposed in the NYT, and it’s completely true. Check the evidence: $25 million from Google and Microsoft to pump the firehose of tweets into search results, a full ecosystem built around the Twitter API, even an apps marketplace, Oneforty, built around the ecosystem. Incidentally, Oneforty, the… Read More
I know very little, erm nothing really, about APEX, but I do know there’s a robust and tight-knit community of APEX developers out there, including (but not limited to) Chet (@oraclenerd) and Dimitri (@dgielis). I know this because friend of the ‘Lab Carl Backstrom talked about it a lot, like every chance he got. Little… Read More
This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. When a product reaches maturity, meaning it works as designed (mostly), the ugly bugs are resolved and you’ve got a good number of users, inevitably, as a product team, you begin planning for new features. Most of the time, your initial release doesn’t include… Read More
Earlier in the week Noel “Mr. OraTweet” Portugal asked a question over OraTweet, natch, that created some interesting discussion. Do you think that all links in websites should open on new tabs (or windows)? I think so, but thats just me… I figured I’d share it with you all to widen the audience, but first,… Read More
Over OraTweet last week, I gently corrected an old friend of mine when she called those of us using Oracle’s mirco-blogging tool “nerds”. We’re not nerds. We’re geeks. This person hails originally from Eastern Europe, so the nuances and cultural connotations of the two aren’t part of her DNA. Being the quizzical type, she asked… Read More
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… Read More
The title sounds pretty highbrow academic. It’s funny to me. Anyway, I just read that according to ComScore, Twitter grew 131% in March. Insanity. That number doesn’t include international or client-based usage. While I read through my feeds today, I got five new follows, all from people I don’t know. Oh, and there’s the whole… Read More
Glad you asked, or didn’t either way, you’re still reading. It’s been a long time since I blogged about new features on Connect. I know not everyone can see the goodness (or care), since it’s internal only. But I figure some of you might be interested anyway. When last I wrote about Connect features, we… Read More
Twitter is exploding. You’ve probably seen the numbers. 1,382% comparing February 2009 with February 2008. More than 50% from January 2009 to February 2009. By all measures, that’s an insane growth rate. Mainstream media has taken note, and celebrities (and impostors) are flocking to Twitter in droves. Pun intended. Do you have a favorite celebrity… Read More
Back in 2006 while on a trip to HQ, I sat in a meeting with some folks from the User Experience (UX) team. I don’t remember exactly what the purpose of the meeting was, but we wandered off topic and were just bouncing ideas off each other. I threw out the idea of a zero… Read More
IE6 is like that cold that just won’t go away; you feel well enough to go to work, but it keeps sapping your energy. To many users, IE6 is the Internet. It came with your computer, and it’s the way you get online. Resisting the urge to put online in quotes. Like many web apps,… Read More
This post about running APEX in the cloud by Jason Straub came across OraNA last week. I’m surprised Chet didn’t pounce on it, being the APEX devotee that he is. Basically, you can now run APEX on Amazon EC2 for 60 cents. Oracle has recently been rolling out more offerings with AWS, including database and… Read More
Now, we know where you are . . . but only if you tell us. Yesterday, Rich completed the addition of geolocation tracking to Connect. Now, when you OraTweet your location or update your Connect status with the secret phrase “@location” followed by a place (address or city or country), Connect stores your location. And… Read More
The title comes from a phrase that stood out for me in this post from RWW. That post highlights some really sweet data pr0n (TwitterThoughts and World Twitter Map) built by Yvo Schaap that uses the Twitter API for data, Yahoo Pipes for parsing and the Google Visualization API for producing the eye candy. All… Read More
I read a couple Twitter news items today that interested me. First was an interesting TED talk from Twitter co-founder and CEO, Evan Williams. It’s embedded below, if you’re reading on theappslab. If you’re not, click through and have a look. It’s only eight minutes, so not a major time spend. The title caught my… Read More
Yesterday, I promised to share the Pinch Media metrics Clayton has collected for the Oracle People iPhone app. Here’s a snapshot. There are 30 new users since yesterday, which seems like a nice growth rate to me. Clayton mentioned over OraTweet yesterday that adoption was slower than he anticipated. Based on the comments left here… Read More
So, yesterday I started making the case for social search as an excellent way to find information locked away within an enterprise, and the ability to get good information from social search pays for investments in social networks. I didn’t cover much detail though. So, that’s the focus of today’s post. Social search in my… Read More
When you start talking to an enterprise crowd about social networking, inevitably someone asks for real business benefits, a.k.a. ROI. I know, hard to believe. When we first started the ‘Lab, Paul used to ask how many people have a Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn account. Usually less than half the room would raise hands, and that number went… Read More
