Oracle AppsLab

I blogged about Fire Eagle last week. Remember? The service that stores and brokers your location and provides a host of APIs for anyone wanting to integrate location data into their web apps.

That post got 0 comments, which was a bit surprising. I thought Eddie or Dan or Matt would be geeked to check out Fire Eagle, ideally coupling it with Twitter for geo-location at OpenWorld. After all, ad hoc meetups like the one Rich and I had with Lou Springer last year would be way easier if you could our locations see on a map (like from Fireball) or by tweeting command to get our locations (like Firebot).

Maybe it’s because Fire Eagle is still in closed beta.

I contacted the Fire Eagle team, and Jeannie was nice enough to give me 20 invites. So, if you want one, leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter, whatever. Get ‘em while they last.

I found another sweet use for Fire Eagle in social network du jour, Brightkite. Brightkite uses your location, plus your friends to facilitate real life social interaction. I know, hard to imagine. It sports a sweet mobile integration and has some nice bells and whistles, like Twitter integration for contacts and location updates.

Plus, they have a Fire Eagle app that can read/write your location from/to Fire Eagle. It’s pretty well hidden though; you’ll have to dig to find it. Psst, in Account Settings, on the Sharing tab, below the fold. Or see here, way down at the end of the post.

The combination of networks and location is solid. You have all these “friends” online, and some of them you might actually want to meet. Then again, you might not want to meet the people who throw sheep at you in Facebook.

It’s even more applicable to business contacts and colleagues. Say you’re traveling and need to find a meeting or the local Oracle office. Or your pals Rich and Raimonds are coming to Portland for RailsConf. Be easier to find them if they told you where they are.

Anyway, I think it adds a useful dimension to your network. Problem is it’s not that easy to figure out how Fire Eagle updates these apps. I’m still trying to get it right. If anyone knows how Fire Eagle works in detail, let me know; I have questions.

Or hit me up for a Fire Eagle invite and help me test. Jeannie tells me they may be in public beta before OpenWorld, but I can’t wait that long to get started.

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 each member, except yourself, if you’re the owner, natch. You can’t leave your own group.

The error message made me laugh. Hat tip to ENTP, probably Courtenay for that Easter egg.

This week’s focus is bug fixing and stabilizing last week’s changes. Expect new goodness next week. Don’t forget to submit your excellent OpenWorld session suggestions and check out these excellent submissions from non ‘Labbers:

• So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?: Dan “Corner Case” Norris
• Use these simple tips to quickly find answers to your Oracle related questions and keep your Oracle skills up-to-date: Eddie Awad
• Evangelising - The Future of Enterprise Apps.: Shishir Srivastava
• Back to basics: Simple database web services without an application server: Chris Muir
• Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle E-Business Suite: Raimonds Simanovskis
• Good Old Fashion Coding Competion: Matt Topper
• Oracle and Startups : Solutions, Scalability, and Speed: Matt Topper

Less than a week since we deployed it, the Suggest a Session for OpenWorld 2008 offer made by the Events team on Mix has been a big hit.

Traffic was up over 250% over the weekend, and the voting page is already among the top pages on Mix in terms of pageviews over the past 30 days. That’s compared to a full month of traffic for other pages and only four days of traffic for the session page.

This is good news and I think, something of a surprise to the people running the event. While they expected participation, this is more than anticipated. And we want to sustain the momentum.

I need your help (again). Paul immediately identified a problem when he checked out the sessions. We need a way to filter the list effectively. The two tabs on the voting page, “Latest” and “Greatest“, tend to neglect the middle, i.e. not highly voted or recent ideas. As the list grows, people are less likely to page through all the sessions (there are already 39), which hurts the suggestions in the middle. This is another manifestation of the Google effect, i.e. people are unlikely to page beyond the first set of results.

We could append high-level product families (e.g. database, middleware, apps) to the session ideas, but not all ideas fit a product neatly. A tag cloud was suggested, since most of the session ideas have been nicely tagged. Tag clouds tend to focus the user on the largest tags, though, introducing a new problem.

How do you think we should solve this problem? This problem has been around for a while, and no one has solved it completely. So, I think maybe some good old crowdsourcing is in order.

If you have an idea, drop a note in comments, but know that there are no promises here. We reserve the right to make executive decisions.

And don’t let this deter you from entering your suggestions. We’ll work out a way to give them all equal time. I promise, even though suggestions from the ‘Lab are the top two right now We want to have all the ideas out there. I’d rather sit in a session than give one; it’s way easier.

Rich is exception here, since if you read here, you get exposed to my babble all the time. A session at OpenWorld would just be more of the same. But seriously, why wouldn’t you want to hear Rich talk about JRuby? The guy’s a JRuby maven.

I hear he’s available for weddings and all your special events too.

I spent portions of this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday attending my very first BarCamp, held here in Portland at CubeSpace.

The origins of BarCamp are interesting; back in 2005, O’Reilly held a user-generated conference called Foo Camp that was invite only. Lots of people wanted an invite (kind of like Web 2.0 Summit, ahem), but were shunned. So, they organized BarCamp, which followed the same principles of user-generated content. The name is a spin-off of foobar, which is not to be confused with FUBAR. Got all that?

If you’re wondering, BarCamp is a type of unconference. Basically, there’s a big board of meeting spaces on one axis and times on the other axis. People with a topic to present, place the topic summary in their desired spot, and the big board serves as the conference guide for those attending.

This weekend’s topics varied wildly, mostly around tech, primarily open source, which is very strong here in Portland. There were several other, “only in Portland” sessions like “How to raise chickens sustainably” hosted by Legion of Tech board member, organizer and chicken maven Selena Deckelmann.

Incidentally, sustainable food sources are a big deal in Portland, which is one thing I love about this town.

Anyway, I enjoyed milling around CubeSpace checking on sessions, exchanging ideas with people, networking (always), and drinking bubble tea. Portland has a very vibrant and well-organized tech scene, thanks in large part to the efforts of people like Selena, Dawn Foster, Rick Turoczy and many others.

You may be surprised to hear that Oracle was a sponsor of this BarCamp. Justin and Marius were nice enough to help out when I asked. People were somewhat surprised to see Oracle listed as a sponsor, so I had fun explaining a) what I do and b) why Oracle was sponsoring.

I highly recommend checking out a BarCamp, if you have the can. It’s a great opportunity to meet people, present your topic of choice and learn some stuff, all for free.

Last night, as promised, Rich deployed some new stuff built by ENTP, right before they headed to a midnight Iron Man showing. On a side note, is he really a superhero?

The shiny new feature is Suggest a Session. If you have an idea for a session you’d like to attend or present, bounce over to Mix and add it by June 13. It helps to give as much detail as possible, including any speaker suggestions and agenda thoughts you have. Use this as the hook to get votes.

The top vote-getters will be added to the conference agenda. I just hope the other sessions won’t judge them as “online winners”. Get in the game and vote for your favorites before June 24.

Rich and I seeded some sessions we’d like to present.

• Ruby/JRuby on Rails on Oracle: With the release of the instant client for Mac, Rubists everywhere can start accessing Oracle on their favorite platform, if they’ve upgraded to Leopard. Rich can fill you in on how to use Ruby in the enterprise to build New Web-style apps.
• Doing 2.0 in the enterprise, lessons learned, tips and tricks, or the “what if someone posts porn” session: Judging by the Web 2.0 Expo and my increasing load of business development, enterprises are headed full bore into New Web. That means a lot of questions, many of which we can answer from our experiences.
• Social networking and hidden demand, how to harness if for productivity: Social networks aren’t just for kids and poking. People are social, and work is social. This session describes how work can be more social (read fun) without losing productivity.

There are already a handful of sessions out there from friends of the ‘Lab Chris Heller of Grey Sparling Solutions and Jim Marion. What is it about those PeopleSoft guys?

Vote early and often.

We made a couple other changes of note. Questions now have a body, so you don’t have to cram your question into a 255 character field, which made for some interesting questions. Consider this idea implemented. If only Mix had an implemented ideas tab.

We also added a preview for the badges we deployed weeks ago. This was a bit of an Easter egg feature, since it wasn’t entirely finished. If you want to tell people you’re attending OpenWorld this year, bounce over to your profile page in Mix, scroll down to just below the My Network widget and you’ll find the badge code and preview. Copy the HTML and paste it into your blog or anywhere that supports script tags.

Example of a place that does not support script tags, Wordpress blog posts.

Enjoy the new features. If you want to keep up with all the announcments and OpenWorld pageantry make sure to join the OpenWorld group.

So, two keynotes from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo are worth watching, if you have a block of time.

One is Clay Shirky’s keynote from Wednesday afternoon. His observations are keen, and his presentation is both funny and interesting, well worth the 16 odd minutes.

The other is Dan Lyons’ keynote from Friday, which I missed in person. Once an avid fan of Dan’s alter ego, Fake Steve Jobs, I broke up with him last year when his identity was revealed. Rich insisted that I watch his keynote, and as always, Rich was right. While I probably won’t subscribe to FSJ again, I did enjoy the keynote immensely.

Lyons gives a great account of his reasons for staring the FSJ blog, ribs the navel-gazers in the Valley and generally comes off as a manic, funny man. Definitely not as thought-provoking as Clay Shirky, but equally worth the investment of 25 minutes, if only for a good laugh.

I think each contains words on the FCC’s no-fly, or no-broadcast, list. If that sort of language offends you, consider yourself warned.

Also of note, many of the presenters at Web 2.0 Expo provided their presentation slides for public consumption. So, if you missed the conference, but wanted to know what went on, check out the list and browse the slides.

One session Paul and I attended and found very useful is not on that list. It was hosted by TripIt’s Andy Denmark and called “Web 2.0 Expo: Making Email a Useful Web App”. Andy has published his slides, and again, they’re worth reviewing.

Like many companies, Oracle has a deep-seeded email culture, which makes it tough for people to adopt New Web fully. Andy’s session showed great case studies of how to use email as a bridge between the good old inbox and the New Web frontier. Very cool and germane stuff.

Enjoy.

Did you attend Web 2.0 Expo? Did I miss something totally worth the time investment? Work it out in comments.

Those of you looking to beat the Monday blues (this coming Monday) should come out to CommunityOne 2008 in San Francisco. I’ll be part of the Ruby panel that’s being chaired by Tim Bray. Should be a good event. Best part… IT’S FREE!!!

The Ruby panel I’m on will be joined by Mark Driver, Gartner, Thomas Enebo, Sun Microsystems (and JRuby co-lead), David Koontz, Happy Camper Studios (of Monkeybars fame), Sarah Mei, Independent Programmer, and moi.

If you go, twitter me at rmanalan.

I blogged about TripIt and Dopplr a while back; both services collect your travel plans, allow you to share them with people, and alert you when people in your network are nearby your stated location.

Until recently, you had to tell them both where you were. Then Yahoo released Fire Eagle into private beta in early March (coverage), and Dopplr became one of the first applications to use it. Fire Eagle is very simple at base. You tell it your current location. That is all.

The awesomesauce comes from applications built on Fire Eagle’s APIs and its privacy brokering. Some people, myself included, have paranoia about location tracking on the Interwebs. After all, one of the primary tenants of the Interwebs is its push model for privacy: “nobody knows you’re a dog” or where you live, unless you tell them. Remember the ongoing flap about Google Street View?

Fire Eagle collects your location from you, dodging the creepy bullet a bit, e.g. I can tell it I’m in a particular country, city, zip code or exact address, depending on how detailed I’d like to be.

So what?

By collecting and brokering your location, Fire Eagle provides a central, safeguarded place for your location data. Now for the awesomesauce.

Fire Eagle offers API kits in six different languages, C#/.NET, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby, which encourages developers of all language persuasions to try it. Once you build an application and have it approved by Fire Eagle, your users with Fire Eagle accounts can authorize your app to interact with Fire Eagle.

For example, when you authorize Dopplr’s Fire Eagle application, you tell it at what level it can read your location and whether it can update your location. So, if you’re a rabid Dopplr user, you probably want it to update your Fire Eagle location, since that’s your app of choice. If some other location-aware app comes along, you can modify your settings for Dopplr, or forget the authorization entirely and return to Dopplr’s standard functionality.

So, Fire Eagle brokers your location privacy among apps you have approved. At Web 2.0 Expo last week, I found out about a couple new apps that also use Twitter, Fireball and Firebot.

By integrating with Twitter (and Upcoming in Fireball’s case), these services combine short messaging with location. Fireball is still in private beta, but I set up and used Firebot yesterday. All you do is follow Firebot, tweet an authorization command, authorize the app in Fire Eagle, and go. You use Twitter’s direct messages to update your location and query other people’s locations.

As you can see from the image, Rich isn’t using Firebot yet, but I was able to find someone who is. This request-response by commands is reminiscent of the mail list daemons that control subs/unsubs, and incidentally, yet another cool usage of Twitter. This time as a command line input.

Now for the big finish. I’m hoping to get some Fire Eagle invites and test out one or more of these Twitter integrations at OpenWorld this year. We have a good-sized community of Tweeters, and by adding location-awareness, we could find each other quickly and organize meetups while we wander around the massive conference. All without polluting our Twitter streams with “here I am” tweets.

I’m working on the invites now. If anyone can help, let me know in comments.

Even if you’re underwhelmed by the whole location aware thing, this is still a compelling case study for APIs. Check out the slides from a session at Web 2.0 Expo called, “Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen“.

Fire Eagle represents an emerging trend in APIs, presenting niche data that can be easily and quickly integrated into larger apps. This gets at the Web 2.0 principle of “data as the next Intel Inside”, i.e. expose your data through useful APIs and let your consumers use these data as they want, in combination (OK, mashed) with other services they already use, like Twitter.

Cool stuff. We’ve had requests to do some location integrations with both Connect and Mix. Using Fire Eagle may be an easy way to accomplish this. If only we had more invites.

What do you think about all this? Sound off in comments.

W00t!

Registration for Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is officially open. The massive conference is back in its Fall timeslot, September 21-25, 2008 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

This year’s shindig will include large doses of Mix, as previously teased. We’re planning to deploy some new features built by our friends at ENTP later this week (fingers crossed).

Of course, we hope to see all your happy faces there, but even if you can’t make it to OpenWorld in person, you can stay involved and follow online. We’ll be using Twitter (natch) at the conference, and there will be loads of virtual ways to participate. Here are a few:

• Join the Mix OpenWorld Group
• Read the OpenWorld Blog
• Track the OpenWorld Wiki

People are already asking me about a blogger program for this year’s conference. If you recall, last year’s program caused quite the kerfluffle. I really know nothing about this, since it will be handled by Marketing, just like last year. I hope they will renew the program this year.

The ‘Lab will be there this year, as far as I know. We’ll keep you updated on any sessions and events we’re attending, formal and informal, as the days count down to September.

Until then, feast on the virtual goodness.

The whole ‘Lab gathered in San Francisco last week to attend the Web 2.0 Expo, which explains why the content here has been stale for a week.

After a Monday huddle with Rich to plan the upgrade of Connect, our internal version social network and idea site to the Mix code line, we headed to Moscone for the Expo.

Rather than recount my week, I’ll hit the highlights and share some observations. I doubt anyone wants an account of my every action for four days.

Interesting Sessions
I really enjoyed the content in “Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web“. Paul, Rich and I were all in this session, and despite a few broad generalizations from the panel, e.g. women prefer 2D to 3D images, the content was solid. I did manage to find the research they were citing, and I think it’s safe to say most people dislike 3D images.

The session was covered a few other places in more detail. The key takeaway for me was how to apply gaming to seemingly mundane software. Everything can be a game. We’re big fans of making products fun, so when Connect relaunches, we’re planning to include some game-like aspects.

I also enjoyed “Web 2.0: Fabulously Useful and Confusing“, hosted by Leanne Waldal, that focused on how regular, non-technical people reacted to popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others. The panel was comprised of these people, rather than topical experts. You can view Leanne’s presentation, which includes video reactions of people while they use these sites.

My takeaway from this session reenforced what I learned after last week’s edit icon SNAFU, i.e. we need to spend equal time thinking about function and form. Mix and Connect have broad user populations that are not familiar with many of the paradigms we take for granted.

Keynotes
Tim O’Reilly’s keynote on Wednesday was inspiring, i.e. use technology to do good, but after the geek version of the battlefield speech in Braveheart, Max Levchin, CEO of Slide, came on and cracked wise.

If you don’t know, Slide brings you “fun” (read annoying) Facebook apps like SuperPoke! and FunWall! Yes, the names officially have exclamation points; I didn’t add them for emphasis.

Max’s words about how spam can be fun and profitable (his company recently raised $50 million in venture funding giving it a valuation of $500 million) sat in stark contrast to O’Reilly’s huzzah. If you were following the Expo on Twitter, you probably saw similar reactions from people in the crowd.

Clay Shirky’s keynote was great. The ancedote about his friend’s little girl digging behind the TV to find the mouse to control Dora was one I think I’ll borrow. His thoughts on technology are very topical. Oddly, I sat next to him in a session, but didn’t know who he was. Rich found my ignorance amazing. Oh well.

The Thursday keynotes featured John Battelle interviewing Marc Andreesen. I found myself wondering where those two would be if it weren’t for technology, since each has made his name thanks to the Interweb.

The keynotes were recorded, and if you have some time, I’d recommend browsing them for a taste of the Expo.

General Observations
Paul and Rich noted early in the Expo that the vibe was different this year. As veterans of previous Web 2.0 Expos, they noticed a shift in the attendee profiles.

Paul put it best when he asked rhetorically if Web 2.0 had jumped the shark.

Many have predicted that 2008 will be a tipping point for Web 2.0 as it moves into enterprises, a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0. The session topics and attendees showed a definite skew toward corporate adoption and uptake of Web 2.0 principles and technologies.

Apparently, all the good startup names have been taken. Every startup seemed to have “Fire” or “Rocket” in its name. We should rebrand ourselves as AppsRocket or FireLab or AppsRocketFireLab.

People
One of the primary reasons I attend conferences is to meet people. The Expo was no different. Here’s a rundown:

• Dan McCall was in a session I attended. We’re talking this week about internal change at his company and demoing what we’ve done in the ‘Lab.
• I met Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage, very briefly, and his company was one of the host of the South Park crawl.
• At the book launch for Groundswell, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, I ran into Darryl Taft of eWeek, Mary Jo Foley who covers Microsoft for ZDNet and Dan Farber, the new head of News.com and longtime journalist and blogger.
• Thanks to Craig Cmehil, I met some SAP people, Moya Watson and Rebecca Sowards-Emmerd. Through Moya, I met Leanne Waldal who hosted the panel session I mentioned.
  
• I finally met Sam Lawrence of Jive, whose enterprise octopus wheelchair made it easy to find him at the Expo.
• I met a bunch of Oracle people, including Jenn Gil, Carl Backstrom, Mauricio Guzman.
• The entire ‘Lab had lunch with Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems. We’ve chatted with him before, but his company made news last week by launching a “Facebook for the enterprise”. Coincidentally, thanks to Charles and Trampoline, we were mentioned in TechCrunch, US, UK and Japan w00t!
• I also got to see old friends like Jeremiah Owyang, Dawn Foster, David and Marius. I heard Justin was stuck at the Oracle booth, but Julio was strangely absent.
• Update: I met Paul’s sister Marci who heads PR at Tellme.
• More updates: We demo’ed Mix and Connect to Jeff Nolan. I hung out briefly with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW and met Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. I’ll add more as I remember them.
  

I didn’t get to spend much time at the Oracle booth on the show floor, but I heard it was hopping. I spent so little time browsing the booths that I forgot to pick up my Web 2.0 t-shirt. Sorry Michael. I hear they ran out of mediums pretty fast anyway.

Best of all, I got to hang with the ‘Lab. We don’t often get together as a team. The last nugget I’ll share is that Paul finally started to “get” Twitter and is now updating and following people. I guess he was right about Web 2.0 jumping the shark

After a slow Twitter weekend, I stumbled across a new Twitter tool, TwittEarth, via Mashable.

This is a beautiful representation of Twitter’s public timeline, similar to twittervision, but with goofy avatars in 3D. It reminds me a lot of the work stamen design has done with Digg, e.g. arc. The visualization shows how many people are active in the Digg community at any given time. Tools like TwittEarth and twittervision do the same for Twitter.

Google recently released the Google Visualization API, based on software written by Hans Rosling. Check out his software in action at TED a few years ago. It’s both phenomenal and convincing, showing the true power of good data visualization.

One of the few Facebook apps that I still use is Friend Wheel, which shows how my network is intertwined and especially the clustered areas of friends.

Aside from being cool eyecandy, these representations give substance to data. Visual representations of data are something we take for granted. Remember the last time you built a slide deck with some data? I’ll bet you’ve used fonts, colors, pie charts, graphs to emphasize the data you had to present.

People have a much easier time relating to abstract concepts when they are represented visually. Frequently, the metadata collected provide an equally or more interesting representation. For example, TwittEarth includes the tweet (data), but what makes it really appealing is the metadata (location mapped to the globe). At a glance, you can tell that the US and Europe are active now, probably due to the time of day.

We’ve been trying to build visualization into Mix and Connect for a while. It’s easier said than done. I do think that a great visualization leaves an impression, e.g. I saw Hans’ presentation months ago, and when Google finally released the Visualization API, I spent a few hours trying to figure out ways to use it. His presentation was made more compelling by the eyecandy.

What do you think makes a good data visualization? What type of visualization could make Mix and/or Connect more compelling or interesting?

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 tough if you aren’t staying in the city, but we’ll make it work.

That’s our commitment. We do the hard stuff.

Web 2.0 Expo has its own social network (natch), hosted on CrowdVine. You can do all the usual social network stuff, network, comment, stalk, I mean friend, people you’d “like to meet”.

Plus it has the entire session and activity agenda baked in, so I can tell people what sessions I’m attending or interested in attending, like an advance popularity rating. More stalking possiblities.

Anyway, our profiles are there: Anthony’s, Paul’s, Rich’s, mine. Drop a note in comments if you’ll be there and want to hang out or do something work-related.

I think Oracle is a Platinum Sponsor this year, and there will be a large (20′ by 20′ I’m told) Oracle booth, complete with micro-unconference. Carl (APEX guru), Justin, OracleJulio and Marius will be there among others.

Let us know if you’ll be there. It’s always nice to put a face to an avatar in meat life. Expect sporadic updates next week, as we all juggle the rigors of conference attending.

Oh and Michael, I haven’t forgot your t-shirt request, medium, right? I’ll see what I can do.

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 (for remove).

Since the deployment of the new icons, I’ve had several people send feedback asking how to edit their profiles. This tells me the pen icon, even with hover-over help, wasn’t doing a good enough job. So, we deployed some new buttons, icons and text to make it more easy to use.

This got me to thinking about UI and users.

New Web pushes the design paradigms for usability, and early adopters are very tech savvy. We call them “power users” in enterprise software. Early adopters are obviously not risk averse with regard to UI, meaning they want to tinker and are willing to investigate and probe to figure out a UI. Frequently, they will laud or criticize new usability patterns very openly. It’s all part of the early adopter mindset. Early adopters look at enterprise software and laugh at its moribund UI.

In enterprise software, we’re used to making features as obvious as possible, working within the constraints familiar to users, e.g. functions are buttons, not icons. Enterprise users are not early adopters. They represent the vast majority of computer users, and they want features and functions to be obvious and easy. These users are frustrated at the thin, undocumented UI they see in Web 2.0.

I’m generalizing in both cases to make a point.

The puzzle for New Enterprise Web (NEW, sure Enteprise 2.0 works too) is balancing cutting-edge UI design with established paradigms. On the one hand, sites like Mix seek to introduce new concepts, including UI, to enterprise users so they can reap the benefits. Without them, there is no Mix. On the other hand, Mix needs to show its New Web chops or be written off as another lipstick/pig effort by an enterprise software company that “doesn’t get it” (the ultimate insult in tech).

As the product manager, this is one of my top concerns. How do I balance the two?

This week’s user group activites at Collaborate 08 and recent promotion from Justin have driven a lot of new visitors and traffic to Mix. We’ve increased our userbase by 50% very quickly and will probably pass 12,000 users on Monday.

This problem will get worse, unless I can balance form and functionality in the right amounts for all our users. I know people out there have ideas. Want to help me? You know what to do.

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 to compete with the Facebook’s social apps model… it was only a matter of time before someone did it — I’m glad that Google ultimately decided to make it happen.

Our vision for OpenSocial is different from all the consumer based social networks that are currently using it to catch up to Facebook.  One of the first things we learned here at the AppsLab is that there is large pent-up demand for social applications within an enterprise.  A large organization like Oracle can be more productive when the social aspect to day-to-day business is made available to employees.  We saw this demand first hand when we built Connect and IdeaFactory last Summer.

For those who don’t know much about OpenSocial, all you need to know is that it’s a big deal for enterprises, but most people don’t know it yet.  Here’s why it’s not on the radar of most enterprises:

• OpenSocial was built to satisfy the need of existing social networks who need a way to allow users to plugin applications into their network — it’s not being built with enterprise requirements in mind (i.e., “enterprise class” security and provisioning, and other “enterprise” technology jargon) — and to me, that’s a blessing.  The biggest thing that slows down IT projects inside an enterprise is the loads of crap that developers have to follow.  In most cases, all of that is overkill.
• OpenSocial participation (right now) is mainly by those thinking about the consumer market — with the exception of SalesForce.com (another founding member).
• OpenSocial is in early adoption mode.

I like to think that we’re a forward thinking bunch at the Lab.  Paul and I have extensive experience with enterprise portal since we spent many years before this gig dealing with portals.  From my perspective, OpenSocial is what enterprise portals should have been.  OpenSocial will make it easy for employees within an enterprise to build and deploy their apps in a decentralized fashion.  Death to IT.

As we move closer to upgrading Connect with OpenSocial apps enabled, we’ll blog about it here to give you a glimpse of this vision.  We think it’s a big deal and hopefully once we have something to share, you will too.

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 by ENTP. Expect more sweet features from them in the coming weeks.

If you’re a diehard reader, you’ll recall we also run an internal professional network/idea site inside the Oracle firewall called Connect. Even though Connect has been static as far as features go since September, we still average 10,000 visits each week, and by now more than 35% of Oracle employees have logged into Connect at least once.

This is hidden demand. We haven’t done much promotion on any of the main Oracle internal portals, and to find Connect, you have to be sent the URL.

Our plans have always been to upgrade Connect to the Mix code line. Connect has no groups feature, but it’s the most-requested enhancement. This is why we built groups into Mix. I’ve been doing a lot business development internally with teams who want to use Connect for group activity, like the Oracle Women’s Leadership program.

However, we’ve been so busy tweaking Mix and working on enhancements to it that we haven’t had time to move back to Connect. A good problem to have, but still a bummer because Connect has great potential.

Well, we’re finally about to kickoff the upgrade process for Connect data, which will ensure everyone’s network, ideas, profiles, etc. will be preserved when we switch over to the Mix code. Once that’s done, and we’ve deployed internally, we’ll be starting on some interesting new stuff.

For about a month, Anthony has been tinkering with OpenSocial-enabling Mix. This idea is Rich’s brainchild, and I have to credit him with seeing potential in OpenSocial and dragging me along. Not that I didn’t see potential, but since the project is so new, I didn’t expect it to be ready for primetime for months.

As Paul says in his presentations, everyone should “Get a Rich”.

And in case you’re still wondering, the AppsLab had nothing to do with the inclusion of Oracle as a founding OpenSocial partner. Promise.

With Connect as an OpenSocial container, we’ll be able to start building and plugging in applications, which will really make the platform interesting. OpenSocial is all about portability for apps, which we hope will allow communities like the OTN forums, Eddie’s Oracle Community (hosted on Ning and already OpenSocial-enabled) and the new OAUG Knowledge Factory to plug into the Mix community and vice versa.

The beauty of making the network an application platform can be seen on Facebook. Facebook has a core feature set that is focused on what it does. Facebook apps allow developers to build and deploy apps that leverage social network effects, exposing their apps to millions of users. Facebook users can add apps if they want from a directory of thousands.

Everybody wins in this model, Facebok, app developers and users. OpenSocial goes one better by allowing portability of apps between social networks. So, if Eddie built a Q&A app for his Oracle Community network, it could be added to any OpenSocial-enabled network. We plan to OpenSocial enable Mix, so that Q&A app could then be installed by Mix users.

OpenSocial apps have their own data stores, so the Q&A app could share data between networks, effectively joining the Oracle Community with Mix in an area that is functionally valuable to both networks. However, because it’s an app, if people didn’t want it, they wouldn’t have to install it, so no impact to them or to the core platform.

I’m waiting for Rich to write a post on OpenSocial to flesh out the technical details.

Anyway, in addition to creating Connect as a platform for apps, we’re going to build out other features too. Eventually, these should trickle into Mix, since we’re going to maintain a single code line, turning features on and off as needed for each platform.

This is exciting stuff. I’m looking forward to getting started on the design, as the product manager. I’m also the project manager, which means dates, tasks and resource management. Plus, the recent business development stuff means I have to keep other teams informed, especially if they’re stakeholders.

Of course, I have to blog it all, too. I wear a lot of hats.

That’s a lot of information. Thoughts? Fire away in comments.

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 text box supports only limited HTML, the same tags as all the text areas on Mix, no WYSIWYG editing. We weren’t going for a full-blown inbox here, just a lightweight communication system.

This is the first of several enhancement we’re to Mix that have been built by ENTP, a solid Ruby consultancy, paid for by our friends in Marketing. This year, OpenWorld will be using Mix heavily to engage attendees, connect them to one another and broadcast information about Oracle’s annual shindig.

Direct messaging has loads of uses, but it was built specifically to allow people attending OpenWorld to connect securely with each other and coordinate meetings and get-togethers, scheduled or ad hoc for the conference.

Friend of the ‘Lab Marius Ciortea was on tap to write the announcement of this new feature, but he got too busy doing his day job to take on blogging. I’ll let him use comments for any additional information.

Rich also added a few snazzy new icons, and Anthony cleaned up a few bugs. This release was all about messaging though. There’s more to come, so stay tuned.

What do you think of direct messaging? Sound off in comments.

So, I blogged Sunday’s events up to the ACE Dinner, organized by Vikki Lira and held at Panzano in downtown Denver.

Paul and I were graciously invited to mix and mingle with the ACEs and ACE Directors. Dan, Matt, Ameed and Floyd were all there. Plus, I got to meet Bex, Linda, Steven, John, George, Debra and Steve. Here’s a photo Floyd snapped of our table with his iPhone.

Sorry if I missed you there. Thanks to Vikki and Justin for inviting us.

Steve and I chatted about the newly released Knowledge Factory which will house official OAUG content and serve as a professional/social network for OAUG members. Looking ahead, we’re working with OpenSocial (teasing a post from Rich), which should make it easy for OAUG members to cross-pollenated content between Mix and the Knowledge Factory. I’m looking forward to working with Steve, Floyd and others to make this a reality.

Overall, an awesome dinner. As much as I enjoy virtual interactions, it’s great to have a good, old-fashioned face-to-face chat with people.

Monday kicked off the sessions, and ours (well, Paul’s) was early in the morning. Actually, before we headed into the session, we bumped into Paul and Rich’s old PeopleSoft cronies, Chris Heller and Larry Grey of Grey Sparling Solutions. It’s always a trip for me to hear PeopleSoft veterans talk about the old days.

Paul’s session, “Oracle and Web 2.0″ had about 40 attendees. It went well, and we were psyched to be able to demo Connect and Mix, despite questions about network access and VPN concerns up to the very last minute before the session began.

Connect was a bit slow over VPN, and something was blocking Javascript because a few AJAX areas were totally non-functional. Still, the demo was compelling, and the message was pretty well-received.

After the session, I got to meet Jim Marion, the guy Rich replaced himself with in demo services. Jim’s a really bright guy, and I wanted to chat longer.

However, a guy I hadn’t seen in 12 years just so happened to wander into our session and was shocked to see me there. Imagine my surprise. I started at Oracle with this guy, each of us right out of college. We joined Oracle’s college hire bootcamp for sales consultants, which is about six intensive months of training at HQ.

Anyway, I’d lost touch with him years ago, so it was a bit shocking to see him in the flesh. Turns out, he’s in Denver at KPMG. This isn’t the first time this happened to me at a conference.

At OpenWorld 2006, a guy I went to consulting bootcamp with in 1998 bumped into me at a session. Oracle makes for a small world, and it gets into your DNA.

Anyway, after another session, Paul and I had lunch with Jeff Nolan, who heads up NewsGator’s new SaaS division, and Walker Fenton, who leads the Syndication Services division. Best known for their (now free) feed readers, NewsGator is doing a lot of new and different things within enterprises.

I always enjoy chatting with passionate folks about technology, and these two have some great ideas that are developing quickly.

Unfortunately, I had to head out last night, but if you’re interested, Floyd has a photostream of the activity, which goes on all week. You can find numerous blog posts on the festivities too over at Eddie’s OraNA.

Now back to work and your regularly-scheduled programming.

Yesterday in Denver, Jake and I had lunch with a few nice folks from NewsGator, one of which was Jeff Nolan. As you may know, Jeff writes Venture Cronicles. In friendfeed, I noticed that Jeff had posted to his blog, so I went to have a read and ended up reading several posts. This one caught my eye.

The company mentioned prominently was RivalMap. They are a service purpose built for tracking competition. I took a look at the site and watched a good overview of the service (haven’t signed up). Overall I really liked their UI and found it very simple and intuitive and they do a nice job of focusing on the tracking of competitors although I would have liked to see a bit more automation to the process of gathering information (ie. google alert integration, etc).

The real question for me on RivalMap was its applicability to the typical user at a company. Of course every company has competition and they need to stay abreast of it, but does it warrant its own dedicated solution? Will people spend the time to add the content to make it valuable? Wouldn’t companies be better served by a more generic service that allowed say groups for competitor discussions, or similar?

My sense is that very large companies with dedicated competitive intelligence teams would absolutely love this service. I could see those teams signing up and running their organization on RivalMap, but again, how many of those teams are there?

In the end, I have always thought that you should spend your time on your customers instead of your competition, so not a large focus for me, but I have to commend RivalMap for building a product that looks great and goes after a specific challenge. I hope they do well.

Collaborate 08 officially begins today, but I flew in yesterday and got to hang out with Dan and Matt, who were in town early to set up for sessions today.

Thanks to Twitter, I shared a cab from the Denver airport to downtown. The cabbie negotiated $25 each, then tried to change it to $30 when we arrived, unsuccessfully. Welcome to Denver.

Denver is cold, at least it was yesterday. Today is much warmer. There’s a promenade a few blocks away from the Colorado Conference Center, no doubt inspired by the Promenade in Santa Monica. Walking through there, you see signs for Collaborate 08.

Oddly, I saw a child on a leash there too. And later on, a giant shrimp, or I guess a man in a shrimp suit. There’s a Bubba Gump across the street from the super-sweet Hyatt where Matt and Dan are staying.

I’m staying in the less fancy Comfort Inn. My room is on a corner though, so I have a sweet wrap-around window. Initially, I thought this would make sleeping an issue, but it didn’t.  After a day spent with Dan and Matt, sleep was easy.

This morning, I had coffee with Anne Zelenka, friend of the ‘Lab, ex-Oracle EBS, blogger extraordinaire, etc. It’s always a treat to meet online friends in person. Anne had some tidbits from her time at Oracle, e.g. she started the Trading Community Architecture (TCA).

If you’re an EBS person, you probably know the tables for TCA are all prefaced with “HZ”. Turns out that Anne took that product code in honor of her son, a nice bit of trivia. I can relate because the product I used to worked on (and David still does) has the product code “FUN”. All the meaningful codes are taken, so you’re forced to think of less obvious codes.

Anyway, I’m at the conference center today. The giant blue bear peering in the windows is pretty funny. I registered, rummaged through the backpack swag, found the wi-fi and planned my sessions for tomorrow.

Next on the agenda is the ACE dinner tonight. If you’re here at Collaborate, drop a comment so we can meet up in person.

I won’t be here long, thankfully, since I think the altitude is making me overly thirsty and headachy. I hope that’s temporary.