2008 in the Crosshairs

Now that I’ve sang “Auld Lang Syne“, waxed sentimentally on 2007 and wiped a tear, here comes the companion piece, 2008 predictions. I’m not a huge fan of predictions, unless I happen to be right. I still think Google will acquire Salesforce.com; that’s my story, and I sticking to it. But, in the spirit of… Read More

First Meeting of the Working Group

I’ve mentioned the group a couple times, and today, Paul announced the meeting details for the inaugural meeting of the Working Group our support group for new web practitioners.  Bounce over and check it out, if you’ve not already. The call will be held at 0900 PST on Wednesday, December 19, and the plan is… Read More

Publish Your Blog to Twitter

I’ve noticed that a lot of people use Twitter to promote their blogs and the blogs of their colleagues and friends. Twitter is a social network, so this is expected behavior. I find myself clicking on the TinyURLs in tweets out of curiosity more often than not. A tweet like this one from James Governor… Read More

The Working Group

I teased this in my last post on the Blogging Council, which struck me as similar in purpose, but different in execution, to Paul’s latest brain child, The Working Group. The Working Group isn’t an Oracle thing or an AppsLab thing. If you’ve read here for more than a few weeks, you’ll know we encounter… Read More

Hug a Developer

First off, sorry for sending spam and bacn, the other inbox meat, all over the place. I’m trying to build a community here, so mind the dust. Remember Puneet from Life in the Bullpen? His comment on an idea of mine got me thinking of another reason why you should use Mix. The network humanizes… Read More

Mix is for Everyone

Paul announced our new community, Oracle Mix, during OpenWorld. Rich blogged about the experience he and ThoughtWorks had building Mix in 4-ish weeks. Depending on whom you ask, Mix took anywhere from 6-3 weeks to execute, so it was a classic agile project. Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know already, Mix is built in… Read More

Mix is Live

Today is a big day for Oracle and our team. We have been cranking pretty hard for the last 6 weeks to get here. Where are we you ask? We’ll, I like to think of it as camp. Y’know in those everest trips how the teams have to reach a series of camps before their… Read More

The OpenLab

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… Read More

FriendFeed Crosses the Streams

Recently, I blogged about FriendFeed, a new app that aggregates all your friend’s 2.0 activity into a single river of goodness, a la the Connect Activity Log or the Facebook News Feed. In typical new web fashion, FriendFeed is in invite only beta now, and earlier in the week, I got my beta invite. The… Read More

Does Web 2.0 Lead to Laziness?

Not a day after Puneet commented that I am “able to churn out so many high quality posts so often” (his words, unsolicited), I am having writer’s block. I blame the Interwebs and Life in general for not being interesting enough today. So, in lieu of real content, I’m going to riff (tongue in cheek)… Read More

Not My Space

I have a MySpace profile that I use occasionally for comparison purposes. I use the account when I read about some new feature they have or to see how they handle a specific social network feature. Last week, I got bacn from MySpace saying that “Cathy” wanted to be my friend. Although I know MySpace… Read More

On Ties

The term social networking, like blog, has a fluffy connotation. Because its adoption began with young people through MySpace, many people assume that social networks are toys and time-sinks. Actually, they are correct on both accounts. However, as working stiffs like yours truly and people who understand us immerse ourselves in social networks, new uses… Read More

A River of Information Runs Through It

Recent coverage (NYT, Mashable) of FriendFeed reminded me of discussions we’ve had about Connect features. Basically, FriendFeed applies the Facebook News Feed feature to the entire Interwebs, or at the 23 services they integrate with today. You have a(nother) network of friends. Everyone posts stuff to the FriendFeed, which aggregates the posts into a river… Read More

On Social Apps, Trying Again

So, Billy and I had a whimsical dust–up over the differences (or lack thereof) between our approaches to the enterprise-ification of New Web. A few other voices chimed in too. Right, wrong, indifferent, it’s been a slow week. Mr. Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an entry yesterday that hits the core of the differences between… Read More

You’re So Money.

I’ve been shaking my head since reading yesterday that Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to take a stake in the “social utility” darling, not because it doesn’t make sense for both parties (albeit in much different measures), but because the valuation is ludicrous. Microsoft is reported to be seeking a 5% stake in Facebook,… Read More

Faceforce = Creepiness + Spam

I’ll start by saying what I like about Faceforce, the unofficial mashup between Salesforce.com and Facebook. It’s a great example of ad hoc collaboration between two companies in what seems to be an unofficial way. Clara Shih, an AppExchange Product Manager at Salesforce.com and Todd Perry, a software engineer at Facebook, built this integration. It’s… Read More