What’s Next?

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… Read More

Mix Messaging

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,… Read More

AppsLab: Year One

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… Read More

April Fools’ on Mix?

The Mix traffic stats from today show more than double the pageviews (8,200) and visits (1,000) we normally get. These numbers are as of an hour ago, so they will continue to climb slightly as the day comes to a close. They are the highest that I can recall since we launched at OpenWorld in… Read More

Does Spam Irritate You?

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… Read More

More Fun with Numbers

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… Read More

Polishing Mix Groups

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… Read More

Mix Gets a Plug at Google

Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, who worked with Rich on the initial development of Mix last Fall, gave a tech talk at Google last week on “JRuby: The power of Java and Ruby“. He mentions Mix at about minute 61 and talks briefly about the project, built on the “red stack”, i.e. JRuby running on Oracle… Read More

Notes and New Blogs

So, I have returned from vacation on Hawai’i, a.k.a. da Big Island. Yes, it ruled, and yes, I’m suffering from post-vacation hangover. If you’re ever there and want an absolute thrill, take a doors-off helicopter ride up to the molten lava flowing at Kilauea. When the helicopter turns to your side, there’s only a shoulder… Read More

OracleCommunity.net Arrives

Lost in the frenzy of last week’s travel to the Bay Area and the Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit, I neglected to mention Eddie’s brand-spanking new OracleCommunity.net, a “social network for Oracle people” hosted on Ning. I know I’m late to the party, since OraNA tells me it’s been covered here, here, here, here sort of… Read More

More Mix Fixes

Not many fixes to report this week, but stay tuned because Rich and Anthony are cooking up a big update for next week. Since the beginning of the year, Mix usage has slowed to between 7,000 and 10,000 visits each week, which isn’t bad but could improve. With any luck, next week’s changes will re-energize… Read More

Last Week’s Mix Updates

As Rich and Anthony follow a weekly deployment schedule, I’m still finding myself challenged to report the updates they’ve made. Throw in a holiday yesterday, and we’re almost on the eve of this week’s fixes. Anyway, here are the most recent updates to Mix. Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs to us with the… Read More

More Fixes for Mix

We’ve had some growing pains lately here at the ‘Lab. As more people use Mix, Anthony and Rich have more to fix and tweak, which forces us to balance the enhancements we want to make with bug fixes and critical changes. The people use Mix and Connect, the more they want these apps to do.… Read More

Fixes and New Stuff for Mix

Mix has been live for over a month now, and just before Christmas, Rich and Anthony dumped a bunch of bug fixes and new stuff. Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t. Many of these are ideas that people submitted, so this is the part where I say the system works. This is also the part… Read More