Oracle AppsLab

At Web 2.0 Expo about a month ago, Rich, Paul and I all attended a fascinating session called “Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web“. Aside from being interesting, it reenergized me on my quest to make work more fun.

Then, daily operational stuff intervened. I managed to rush some thoughts onto virtual paper, but I haven’t had the luxury to think deeply on the topic.

A few recent nuggets have reminded me. First, PMOG launched. I love the idea; install the toolbar and do your normal surfing. The game happens around your normal activity and is perfect for people like me who spend a lot of time driving on the “information superhighway”. I am skeptical about what they plan to do with all the browsing data, but after combing the privacy and terms, it seems pretty benign, at least for now.

Second, our friends at TalentedApps posted a missive about gaming and engagement. Engagement is a hot topic in this era of job-hopping; employees realize work is a commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder. For employers, finding ways to retain employees, especially in the face of economic uncertainty, is increasingly key.

And third, I discovered the person with the absolute coolest avatar (collection) on Connect just so happens to be into game mechanic and design. Sweet, it’s always good to wrap another head around a complex problem. We’ve kicked this around the ‘Lab for a year, so a new viewpoint is welcome. Read More »

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 people are congregating. Here’s a list of fixes to issues that you may or may not have seen:

• The comments count is now correct for session ideas and other ideas recently created. We fixed a regression that prevented the comments count from iterating.
• The member count for private groups is correct. We also expanded the number of My Groups show from four to eight per page.
• A few Oracle people were stuck in a loop after they signed in for the first time. That was a bummer, and now it’s fixed.
• Another strange regression prevented people from adding products to their profiles. Fixed now.
• We expanded the user cards, so full titles show in lists, like the People page or group member lists.
• Comments on older ideas were getting out of chronological order, back in proper order now.
• Posts to groups were failing silently. They aren’t failing at all now. There’s a unique constraint throwing an error for blogs posts, which will be fixed this week.
• UI elements added for suggest a session looked pretty janky in IE6, surprise! We cleaned them up a bit.
• Ideas needed a reindex; it was throwing Error 500.
• And finally, Topper found a voting bug that allowed people to vote for ideas multiple times.

Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

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.

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »