I added Garfield Minus Garfield to my Reader way back in January due to someone’s tweet.

If you’re not familiar, here’s the about:

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

The strips are surprisingly good, and they offer a view you miss when Garfield is in the mix. Anyway, I assumed the little blog would eventually go the way of Scrabulous, I mean Wordscraper, after the legalities were sorted.

Oh contraire mon fraire.

Jim Davis, Garfield’s creator, apparently enjoys seeing his work remixed and likes reading Garfield Minus Garfield. So much so that the 30th anniversary book of Garfield comics will contain both the original and remixed versions of the strips, side-by-side for comparison.

And Dan Walsh, the mastermind behind the Minus version, will pen the forward for the anniversary book.

How awesome is that?

I wonder if Rich (and people who share his name) get this app for free or at least for a discount.

I’ll back up; so by now, you’ve probably heard about the “I Am Rich” iPhone app that popped up briefly a couple days ago in the App Store. The app costs $999.99, which apparently is the highest price allowed by Apple and provides the following:

The red icon on your iPhone or iPod touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.

It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all.

And it also includes a mantra to help you stay “rich, healthy and successfully”.

When this story surfaced earlier this week, I thought it was a hoax. Apparently, it’s real. Apple took the app down shortly after the blogosphere got a hold of it, but even so, it seems that eight people have purchased this gem (pun intended).

What’s not entirely clear is if these eight Richs intended to do so. This iPhone screen-grab has been circulating the Intertubes, so who knows if these are valid numbers.

All this begs the question: Did Apple do the right thing when it pulled the “I Am Rich” app?

As with all good debates, viewpoints differ; I tend to agree with Jason Kottke. Because the app didn’t (apparently) violate any of Apple’s terms for the App Store that it should have been allowed to remain.

What do you think? Find the comments and contribute your two (or 99,999) cents.

Adoption.

So, this FAQ installment is targeted at enterprise communities.

Now that Connect has groups, people are using it more frequently for centralized collaboration, which is exactly what we hoped. Generally, the person spearheading the community has a plan to promote it and drive its adoption. Sometimes, they ask me for my thoughts, hence the question: How do I get people to adopt and use my group/community/whatever?

Usually, the plan involves a mass email or an announcement as the promotional vehicle. Not that this is bad, but people struggle daily with an overwhelming amount of communication. So, this approach alone won’t bring everyone to the party.

There’s typically a centralized message component too, e.g. the One Ring approach. Sagar ran into this when he tried to standardize blogs and Connect status as means of communication with his team. It’s not enough to tell people nicely or otherwise that this new way is the only way and so it shall be.

I’ve run into this in the past myself. Some people don’t react well to edicts, even if they come from on high. I used to wonder what people thought their jobs were if not to follow the instructions of their management.

Anyway, this is where adoption hits a wall. You’ll get adoption from your One Ring announcement, but it won’t be what you hoped. So, now what?

Adoption is tricky, and unfortunately, it’s a key metric for declaring the success or failure of a community.

Failure is a loaded word here because it suggests that there is only a numeric way to judge success. From the WSJ Business Tech Blog cited research from a Deloitte consultant about a month ago. The consultant’s study of more than 100 businesses with online communities showed:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members.

Although the post points out that pageviews and visits are poor ways to determine success, it does cast the communities with small membership as failures. This isn’t fair.

Engagement, although very hard to measure, is a much better way to characterize the success/failure of a community. For example, a community with less than a hundred members sounds like a failure, but a community where 90% of the members login every day and 70% of the members interact daily sounds like a success.

What if we’re talking about the same community?

Engaging your members should be the goal for adoption, not simply getting them to login and browse around, but actually getting them to use the content and interact with the other members.

Another example. Consider Connect’s two largest groups measured by membership; one is for iPhone users, the other is not. Guess which one has more posts and more comments by a large margin?

If you said iPhone, you win. Judging by membership alone, both groups appear to be successful, but when judged by engagement, one is clearly more successful.

So, how do you foster engagement? Designate a community manager whose only job is to engage members in discussion and help them find answers. Finding answers is frequently the best way to expand the community, too, by drawing in new members. If you have a question, but the expert who can answer it isn’t a member, try to bring this person into the community. Bringing in known experts is a win for your community, and it’s an ego boost for the experts.

So, while you foster engagement, find ways to spread the word beyond the email blast. I’ve mentioned the path of least resistance for questions before, and you should use it to your advantage. To answer questions people:

1. Ask people nearby and people they know, by email, phone, IM, any means necessary.
2. Ask the Interwebs, probably using Google.
3. Ask the “official” support people, i.e. you.
4. Read your One Ring announcement email.

People are super-busy, and these are the fastest ways to get answers, but how do you leverage them?

For 1, spend time with your circle of friends and acquaintances. Explain the value of your community and get them to join and participate. Ideally, this will trigger a viral spread through the strong ties of your network, bleeding over into the weak ties.

At the very least, your personal relationship with them will help them remember your community, even if they don’t participate or engage others. So, when someone asks them a question (see 1 above), they’ll remember you and your community.

Moving to search (2), if you can blog in the open about your community, do so early and often. Use the SEO of blogs to push your posts on to the first page of search results for the keywords you want. Monitor what keyword searches bring people to your blog too. Use this to tweak your content.

According to a Pew Internet Project study cited by TechCrunch today, 49% of Intertubes users consult a search engine daily, so people can find your community, if you play the game.

Whereas using email to promote your community borders on spam, you can use search to your benefit without the same icky feelings.

The iPhone is a good example here. People searching for the keywords “oracle iphone” found my blogs posts about my own iPhone experiences on the first page. They commented on the post and emailed me for more information, and now, that community built its membership into a few hundred people, most of them pretty engaged, without much effort from me at all.

So, even if your community is inside a firewall, external blogging can still help.

You’ll also want to augment with internal versions of the same tactics, i.e. an internal blog and SEO on enterprise search. The latter may be tougher to game, but easier to socially engineer. It could be faster to contact the admins of the enteprise search engine to see if they can bolster your the relevancy of your results for the keywords you want.

If you don’t have enterprise search, cozy up to the portal admins and try to get some link real estate for your community.

So, to recap:

• Engagement > membership numbers
• Path of least resistance > reminder emails, edicts

What do you think? There are a lot of experienced community managers (and members) out there, so what would you add or subtract?

Sound off in comments.

Update: Frank points out a tip to increase engagement in comments, one that we’ve known about but have been tardy introducing. You have to make it easy to be engaged in the community; in the consumer space, RSS is the mode of choice, but if you’re fostering an enterprise community, you’ll want email notifications too.

As the chart shows, email is still the main activity people do online every day. Email is very tricky though because of spam concerns and flooded inboxes. You can dodge the spam issues by offering good email digest options. However, since everyone is overwhelmed with email, don’t be surprised if you introduce email subscriptions and your community doesn’t take off like wild fire.

My money says half or more of the people who say they want email subscriptions will turn them off in the first month. Seems like a good idea, but ten years ago, so did the email newsletter. Anyway, you need to do this, but it’s not a magical elixir. You still need to put in the hard work and be patient.

Which reminds me of a final word of advice.

Patience.

You need it. At least for community building.

The post I did a year ago about the wiki I started inside the firewall to collect iPhone tips and tricks still comes up in the top few results for the keywords “oracle iphone“.

That post is in the top five all time for us, based on traffic metrics.

It also has 71 comments because I didn’t (and won’t) give the link in the wild. Even before the 3G iPhone dropped, I averaged a couple notes a week about its location.

Since we upgraded Connect a few months ago, the wiki server that was running it has been sporadic at best. Rich has better things to do than keep it running, but people have been pinging me about it. It’s a phenomenon.

Until recently, there was no centralized information for employees about how to configure the iPhone to do stuff like send and receive Oracle-based email on the iPhone, sync your Oracle calendar with your iPhone, browse internal websites, etc. You know, productivity stuff.

So, the wiki collected a lot of workarounds and experiences. This was news for me. After I started the wiki, I never really paid attention to it, but today, when I migrated the content to another wiki (more on that in a minute), I realized how much content had been added.

+1 for user-generated content, and +1 for the iPhone as an interesting subject that brings out the hacker in people.

Anyway, I’ve SEO’ed the post title, hoping this post will come up higher in that search to let people know about the new wiki (thanks Tyler). As before, drop a comment or email me for the URL.

On a semi-related note, the word for the day is “wiki”.

Not quite a bug in the Matrix, but still, coincidental. Seems like everything today is about wikis

Paul and Rich hung out with some dudes from a company best-known for their ground-breaking wiki. Sorry I couldn’t make it, one downside of working outside the Bay Area. Anyway, bummed I missed it.

Then, there was the iPhone wiki move, and on that note, why do syntaxes have to be so different between wikis? I spent an hour massaging the content to make it display correctly.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since today just so happens to be WikiWednesday at AboutUs here in Portland, as is pretty much every first Wednesday. But, I didn’t realize that until after the other wiki stuff.

Weird, no? I swear there was something else, but it’s gone now.

Update: The wiki has been replaced by official content provided by our internal IT and security teams. So now, I don’t have to maintain anything

Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac?

I love this type of title because it captures attention by being potentially controversial, and of course, it references Apple. Good tech news writing always drives traffic through the Cult of Mac. Plus, the author dangles a question, instead of an answer, to make it more interesting.

The crux of the article centers around the following research from NPD.

I think NPD refers to the NPD Group, but it’s not entirely clear. Also unclear is what additional context is presented beyond the table. Anyway, these figures leave a lot of unanswered questions about the research and how it was conducted, but setting that aside, they offer good fruit for conversation.

Especially in light of the recent discussions we’ve had here about the virtues of various O/S.

I think we can all agree that when you buy a computer, you’re paying for the software; hardware is a commodity. Maybe not entirely interchangeable when comparing Macs to Windows, but close enough.

The differences between O/S make the cost argument interesting; combine that with the intended user’s skill level with computers, and you get a really interesting cost analysis.

As someone who uses each of the main flavors of O/S on a daily basis, I’m fascinated by this debate because there are so many variables for cost.

• Who’s the primary user and what level of skill does s/he have?
• What’s the intended use for the computer?
• What other software is required/recommended to keep the O/S clean and functional, e.g. anti-virus and anti-spyware software?
• Who’s the first line of support and how much does it cost to get support?
• What comes included, both hardware and software, and what is an upgrade? Who installs the upgrade?

Another interesting talking point is the speed of the Interwebs connection. People frequently say a computer is slow, when they mean that web pages are loading slowly. Your super fast 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor looks like a dog when you’re loading Amazon over a dial-up connection.

Factor in all this (and more), and it’s really hard to get a single answer. Obviously, I was willing to pay double for a Mac, but it fit my requirements. I’m not really a fair example though, since I also paid half for an XP box, and paid $0 to use Ubuntu.

And by the way, it sure would be nice to see a Linux distro on the list. If cost is the primary factor, the question should be, “Would you pay for and O/S?”

What do you think?

Focusing on out-the-door pricing seems too narrow to ask such a broad question. It would be very interesting to see a comparison of expected full costs (not just OOTB) for each of the major O/S.

Find the comments.

Which seeded apps? Any apps you’d like to build or see built? And generally, are you stoked about OpenSocial apps?

Not much in the comments, but somehow, I think there’s interest out there.

OpenSocial is a big deal for us because:

• It allows people to build what they want, in their language of choice. OK maybe not in BASIC or Pascal, but you get the idea.
• It allows users to customize the Connect or Mix experience, adding as many or as few apps as they want.
• It allows developers to harness the social goodness of an existing network without growing their own community.
• Apps are largely portable to any container, allowing the app developer to write once and deploy to many different containers.

And there are more containers popping up all the time. Dan over at the OpenSocial API blog, which you should also read for OpenSocial happenings and goodness, lists the live and soon to be live OpenSocial containers:

Live Right Now

• Webon
• hi5
• IDtail
• MySpace
• orkut
• Hyves
• iGoogle
• imeem
• Netlog
• CityIN
• Tianya
• Shindig sample
• Ning
• Plaxo Pulse

This list includes how to get started with each of the live containers.

Launching Soon

• AOL
• Friendster
• Glam.com
• LinkedIn
• Netlog
• Yahoo!

For more information, check out the “Meet the Containers” video and slides from Google I/O, which Anthony attended back in late May.

So, Connect may be the first OpenSocial container to go live inside a corporate firewall, which is pretty cool. This will give prospective developers a safety blanket environment for building OpenSocial apps. Remember the hidden demand for social networking we observed when we launched Connect a year ago?

I expect we’ll see similar demand among the numerous developers here. In a lot of ways, launching OpenSocial will be OpenLab, Part II, without the “hey, learn Rails and get back to us” step.

I hope to see lots of activity in our directory, ideally with a nice mix of apps, including social, just for fun, enterprisey, productivity, integrations with existing apps. All that good stuff.

It’s tough starting from an empty bucket though, and happily, we’ve had some help from our pals at Google, who helped me sort out the finer points of gadgets and such.

OpenSocial is open source, and Google has contributed a host of gadgets to the project. So, we now have a menu of gadgets and OpenSocial apps at our fingertips for inclusion in our fledgling directory. A menu with more than 45,000 items, which seems like a lot. That’s even bigger than the Cheesecake Factory menu, I think.

So, I’m no longer concerned that we’ll have an empty app directory. Maybe you noticed some gadgets in Rich’s mockup of the app detail page yesterday. We’re glad to have a huge library of gadgets to choose from when we launch.

It would be awesome to have user-contributed apps in the directory when we launch. Our pals in APAC have built a few apps already, including an integration with an internal blogging instance and a FriendFeed app. I’ve been trying to rally Noel Portugal to buld an OpenSocial version of his OraTweet.

I’d love to include an OpenSocial app from Eddie that ties together his Oracle Community on Ning with our container on Mix. Of course, we’d be happy to build one for his use over there too. Two containers using OpenSocial to tie together the Oracle communtiy at large. Nice visual.

What do you think of all this? Find the comments and be heard.

Today, Rich posted a few new mockups today of his vision for our Connect (and ultimately, Mix) OpenSocial UI.

The first mockup shows Rich’s vision for the OpenSocial app detail page.

This is the page you’ll see if you click on an app summary in the app directory or if you see in your Activity Log that someone in your network has installed an app and you decide to click through to get more information. We may even show installed apps on each person’s profile, in which case, you’d see this page if you clicked through on the link.

Rich also finished a mockup of the canvas view that will be available to developers and users. We plan to offer developers the ability to build a canvas view of their app/s; this view is essentially the large version of an app. If you use iGoogle and have the sandbox view enabled, you can see what I mean.

Basically, the canvas view allows for more features and functionality to be surfaced because the developer isn’t constrained to a small, widget-sized area. More real estate means more features for apps.

If you’re savvy to the platform, you’ll notice we will eventually be removing ideas (and answers) from the core platform and redeploying them as OpenSocial apps. This serves a few purposes:

1. It allows ideas and questions to be portable to any OpenSocial container, preserving all the information we’ve collected so far.
2. It allows people to customize their Connect (and Mix) experience, i.e. if you don’t use ideas or answers, you can remove them.
3. It allows other developers to extend the functionality of ideas to include specific features that they want, e.g. idea status and lifecycle management.

So, what do you think? Once Rich is done with his mockups, we’re off to development. This is your chance to influence the direction of Connect and Mix, so why no spead a few minutes thinking critically about the design?

I like to involve new people in design because as the people in charge of caring and feeding for Connect/Mix, we tend to be too close to the problem. I find that new blood, opinions and ideas are often what you need to break out of a funk or to make really important strides.

Find the comments and help us design the future. Seriously.

Push Notification
I think by now, everyone with an iPhone running 2.0 firmware and a few apps understands why apps should run in the background. Seriously, how useful is AIM if you have to run it in the foreground all the time? What if I had to run the phone app to send/receive calls?

I remember the objections Apple presented against background processing apps, e.g. too much battery consumption, hidden CPU consumption, bandwidth consumption for Interwebs apps. From what I hear, the 3G battery life is pretty short, and 2G has never been a power miser either. So, this makes some sense.

Anyway, last week, Apple began seeding an alpha version of push notifications to selected developers. Push notifications work around the lack of background processing by allowing the app to collect updates from a server, similar to what integrated apps like Mail and Phone do now. Updates show as red badges overlaying the app icon.

So for example, AIM would show you when you had messages, rather than running in the background and pinging you in real time when messages arrived. Apparently, the 2.1 firmware update may include push notifications, which Apple committed to providing by September. If they make this date, apps would probably be updated in by the Fall/Winter.

This is an improvement, but some apps, like Pandora, would be left out in the cold. Pandora should function like the iPod app, i.e. it continues to play in the background when you navigate away to do other things. Since the iPod app does this, we know it’s possible. Maybe Apple will reconsider when they review the download statistics for popular apps like Pandora.

Assuming the only concern Apple has is for the user’s battery/bandwidth/CPU, why not open the capabilty and force the user to understand the “risks” before enabling it.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that unlocked iPhones have had background apps since last year. I’d like to hear what they have to say about the toll they take on battery/bandwidth/CPU.

Tethering
For months, Rich has been saying he’d break down and buy a 3G iPhone as soon as it could be tethered to his laptop. For those unfamiliar, many 3G phones can share their bandwidth with a computer, called tethering. Typically, you have to agree to this with your service provide, who in turn gleefully charges you a lot of money.

The benefits are worth it though because you can enjoy broadband-comparable speeds from anywhere your phone can get a 3G signal. Think mobile broadband without the additional card to carry.

Ever since Apple announced the 3G iPhone, it’s been clear that AT&T would not allow this option for iPhones on their service plan. So, last week, the appearance of Nullriver’s NetShare app in the App Store set off a buzz.

For only $9.99, the app allows you to tether your 3G iPhone (or 2G EDGE iPhone). The app quickly disappeared, but not before Rich snagged it. Then it quietly reappeared the following day, but today, it’s gone again, prompting more speculation.

The whole thing seems very odd. Obviously, using the app violates AT&T’s terms, but not necessarily the terms of other carriers. Also, since it uses SOCKS, Nullriver says NetShare doesn’t violate the App Story SDK restrictions. Bit of a dodge, but legit.

Now that it’s in the wild, how can its use be monitored?

I have a feeling that people with “unlimited” data plans may get an unpleasant surprise when they use NetShare. Seems like AT&T could call off all bets if you tether your 3G connection and dump a boatload of fees and penalties on you.

As with everything good, jailbroken and unlocked iPhones have had tethering for months. Tethering an EDGE connection, although slow, would be a useful tool in a pinch. However, since tethering violates the terms of use, AT&T could charge huge fees and overage penalties.

This will be an intersting story to monitor, and since Rich did finally break down, we’ll have a firsthand account.

3G iPhone Burns
This one seems like a stretch, but if you believe it, the 3G iPhone can burn your leg through your pocket. Maybe it only applies if you’re asleep.

Strange as it may sound, I can attest to the heat factor that the 2G iPhone puts out when you’ve been talking on it for any extended period of time, e.g. an hour or more. That sucker gets pretty hot, making it uncomfortable to put up against your ear.

The 3G uses more power, as evidenced by its much shorter battery life. So, maybe this is legit.

Do you have any iPhone tidbits to share? Maybe stuff you’ve noticed or heard? Find the comments.

Maybe your session didn’t make the cut, but don’t be sad or disheartened.

There is another way to present your session topic at OpenWorld.

Sign up for the Unconference.

Justin announced today that signups for this year’s Unconference have officially opened. So, if you nearly made the cut, or you’re all prepared and ready to go, this is your chance to present at OpenWorld.

If you’re not familiar with the unconference format, it’s pretty simple and straightforward. There’s usually a big sheet of paper with time slots on one axis and venues/locations on the other. If you want to present, just write your topic and some basic information on a piece of paper and tape it in an empty slot.

In this case, you can sign up in advance, but there are still slots preserved for spur of the moment signup, i.e. after the actual conference begins. If you don’t know by now, OpenWorld is September 21-25, in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.

Based on the laundry list of great sessions that were suggested over on Mix, ideally, the OpenWorld Unconference will have some very interesting sessions. Plus, if you voted for a session that didn’t make the cut, this may be your chance to see it. If so, head over to Mix and add a comment for the session creator, and maybe you’ll get your wish after all.

Enjoy, and read xkcd if you don’t already, and don’t forget to hover over the comic for the hidden subtest message. I always feel proud of myself when I get one of his jokes.

For example:

• Sounds like Floyd had a Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80, but he says he worked with card batches in college.
• Raimonds used a real classic, the Soviet-made Elektronika BK-0010.
• We know Rich used the Timex Sinclair 1000.

So, I’ll take my turn next.

All this has me whimsically recalling the days of BASIC written on my elementary school’s Apple IIe. I think that’s what it was anyway. Growing up, computers and gaming consoles were luxuries we couldn’t afford, still I managed to get some time on the school computers.

Anyway, as a geek-child of the 80s, I appreciate this shirt.

Through the rest of my educational years, I used Macs of all types (SE, II, IIx, IIcx, LC, IIsi, IIci, Quadra, Centris, Performa, Powerbook) exclusively for all manner of desktop publishing. Remember Quark Express? We used to go nutty with that in the high school journalism room.

I got my first exposure to command line tools in college, using Emacs and Pine for email, still from a Mac though, and I even used a NeXT briefly, believe it or not.

Anyway, all that changed my senior year in college when I supported some animal called a Windows 3.11 at the library. This was the beginning of the Windows era for me.

Then I graduated into the happy, fun world of Win 95 and NT 3.51 and 4. I got a smattering of Solaris too, but not enough to stick beyond basic Unix commands.

I tried to jump on the Red Hat bus in the late 90s, but having two machines allowed me to use the Windows crutch. So, I stayed with Windows, moving through the usual suspects ME, 2000, XP.

After a ten-year hiatus, I finally returned to Apple in 2006, and I haven’t regretted it (yet). I’m still not XP free; despite using Ubuntu and OS X on my machines, I still have to keep XP installed on my wife’s desktop. Although, she does rock an OS X Macbook too.

So, my first computer was really the Apple IIe I used in elementary school. Unlike Rich, I’m not a die-hard hobbyist; in fact, had I gone a different way out of college, I might be just another n00b, er more of a n00b. Still, I enjoy messing about with my machines and trying new software, maybe I’m a wanna-be hobbyist.

How about you? Feel free to regail us with your tales of yore. This is a fun conversation I’m glad Rich started.

Rich has made a lot of progress. For one, he’s scrapped the blue hues that currently grace Connect. We’ve actually had a few people wish aloud that we’d kept the old colorscheme. So, welcome back white, gray and red. Here’s an updated version of the OpenSocial app directory page:

Also, I teased new navigation. We’ve moved away from tabs to a left-hand nav that can be updated.

Rich cranked out a new-and-improved (we hope) home page today. The content will be editable, portal-style, allowing the user to add OpenSocial apps.

So, to let the user know that the apps can be moved around the page, mini/maximized and removed entirely, these options will appear when the user hovers over the app bar.

The question of the day is whether the bar itself should change color when the user pauses the mouse on it.

I say no, based on what other app containers do. Plus, I think changing the color is distracting and not entirely obvious, and it’s more Javascript work.

I think Rich agrees, but I figured why not ask all my pals in blogtown. After all, some of you may actually use this app bar at some point.

So, do you think the app bar, i.e. the bar at the top of the OpenSocial app, should change color when you hover over it to say “Hey buddy, I’m ready for you to do something to me” or are we correct in thinking that’s a bit too much?

Find the comments and help shape the future. The image pages over at Skitch have comments too.

So, maybe you noticed recently that this blog and others produced a feed item or a couple called “!$title$!”. I believe this is a bug associated with WordPress 2.6 because the timing coincided with our upgrade to 2.6.

Plus, several blogs whose feeds I read that are also WordPress blogs had the same mystery item in their feeds.

So, why Portuguese? Because I got a trackback today from a blog in Brazil pondering (I assume) what was up with the weird posts. And because that trackback mentioned us in the same breath as TechCrunch. Good company to be in if you have a blog.

Anyway, Feedburner tells me that phantom post, which doesn’t actually exist on our blog, was the third most popular item from last week, garnering 500 odd views and out-ranking posts like Congratulations to the OpenWorld Session Winners.

Further solidifying the theory that iPhone and Twitter posts are way more interesting than “stuff we do at AppsLab” posts.

Good to know.

My bad. Let’s remedy that.

Rich asked me recently how my move to Ubuntu was going. It’s been almost a month, and he says he has a vested interest in keeping me happy with it. I’m not sure why, but I use this as leverage for tech support, e.g. when I upgraded the Linux kernel, the Cisco VPN client stopped working.

Of course, Rich knew what I didn’t; you have to reinstall the VPN client when you upgrade the kernel. I’m sure this is obvious to some, but not to all, e.g. me and a whole mess of other people. Coincidentally, I had also blown several hours the night before trying to get Avant Window Navigator to work. I wanted to test out some of the sweet visual effects you can use in Linux, specifically the Leopard-like dock, as seen here:

Yes, that’s Ubuntu, not OS X, and there’s a laundry list of steps you can take to customize your Hardy install to look and feel just like Leopard, if you so desire. Pretty cool.

Anyway, turns out my video card won’t do anything cool like that, or at least, I can’t make it do anything cool like that. I came to this realization after about three hours lost. Linux truly is a hobbist O/S, meaning you really have to have the time and desire to make it work. This fits Rich to a tee.

But then Rich dropped a bomb I wasn’t expecting.

He said that after moving to a Mac as his primary machine, he realized how much time he spent on hardware and software troubleshooting in Ubuntu. And here I am thinking he liked all that hacking stuff.

Don’t get me wrong; I like Ubuntu overall, and I know Rich does too. It’s a viable alternative to Windoze, and some stuff just works (a la Mac). But that’s highly hit and miss though because other stuff you may need like video cards, multiple displays, Cisco VPN, etc. works only with a lot of invested effort, if at all.

I can hear the uber-geeks in the Open Source community sniggering that I should stick to Windoze, calling me a n00b, etc. But Rich ain’t a n00b, so to hear him say this surprised me.

All this is interesting in juxtaposition with Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at OSCON last week. Shuttleworth, not surprisingly, sees Linux as the O/S of the future, but definitely surprising was his calling out of Apple as the bar for usability and attractiveness that should be the new standard for Linux.

And he’s right, if Linux hopes to emerge out of the hobbist/developer niche into a full-blown consumer alternative.

With OS X, Apple has managed to woo both ends of the user spectrum, including super n00bs who are brand new to computers and hardcore developers who like the combination of power (bash shell) and usability (stuff just works). Even despite Apple’s closed nature, Mac is the O/S and development platform of choice for many web developers who write in open languages like Rails, ironic no?

Both Mac and Linux continue to make headway in overall market share compared to Windows, with Apple nearing 8% and all Linux distros around 0.8%, they will inevitably draw comparisons among this hardcore crowd.

However, if Shuttleworth’s vision is to become reality, Linux needs to get further into the “just works” territory. This should be attainable, considering how large and motivated the Open Source community is. I’d love to see a Linux flavor push Apple and Microsoft in mainstream adoption, like Firefox has.

And of course, Microsoft is a huge wild card; does anyone really think Redmond will sit still while both O/S market share and browser market share drop below continue to decline? Seems unlikely.

So, have you changed your O/S lately? Do you want to, but can’t make the leap? Do you love OS X and Apple, and if so, why? What do you think of Open Source? Can Linux challenge OS X in usability and attractiveness?

Find the comments, you’ll be glad you did.

The OpenSocial container is finished and ready for app development right now. We just need to add an app directory and tweak the profile and home pages to accept OpenSocial apps.

One line item on our development plan is “populate the app directory”. OpenSocial has been available since late last year, and the app directories on Ning, orkut, MySpace, hi5 and iGoogle are full of OpenSocial apps. We are planning to see if we can import some of the apps in our directory, e.g. the Gadgets built by Google, but not that many will make the cut.

We’ll probably get some helping building a few seeded apps too, to fill up the directory a bit.

So, here comes your chance to pitch in and help decide the future of Connect, and eventually Mix:

What Apps Should We Seed?
If you browse the app directories of consumer OpenSocial containers, you’ll find a lot of consumer apps for sharing social stuff like music, movies, horoscopes, pictures, etc.

We plan to have some of this, since one positive effect of Connect is bringing Oracle employees closer together; all the acquisitions and remote employees means that you no longer work with people you see in the office every day.

Browsing the app directories of these networks, you’ll also find integrations with popular apps like Twitter, GMail, Flickr, Maps, etc. The APIs of these apps make them easy to work with, and integrating them into Connect adds value for people who use them.

I have a list of productivity apps I’d like to see, including a world clock, a news/blog feed, a Post-It style app for personal notes, a socialized version of our bug database. Of course, the standard web portal favorites always make the list: stocks and weather. Useful, yes, but also boring.

What do you think should be on the list? What would you really use on a frequent basis?

Do You Have an App You Want to Integrate or Build?
When we first started talking about OpenSocial apps, the use cases were for Mix. One need area for apps is community integration. Building apps to bridge the various communities (Mix, OTN forums, Eddie’s Oracle Community, OAUG Knowledge Factory, etc.) provides a way for people to centralize their Oracle experience in Connect.

For example, I could add apps for each of my identities into Connect and simultaneously keep up with each community, all from Connect. This approach is powerful for employees

Another use case is integrating an internal app into Connect; Noel’s OraTweet is a perfect candidate for an OpenSocial app. He could reach way more people through Connect, using the network effect, with no impact on his underlying infrastructure (APEX and PL/SQL). Lots of employees use Twitter, more all the time, and I think an integrated client, using an Oracle backend would be interesting to people inside the firewall.

Plus, his work would be spread across the company, showing off his development chops for all to see. Everybody wins.

Are You Stoked to Build OpenSocial Apps?
If reading all this has you excited to get your feet wet with OpenSocial, this is your chance to get started. Connect is ready today, meaning the container is implemented and deployed. It hasn’t been prettied up yet, so you’ll need to mind the exposed wires and un-spackled drywall, but your app would be in among the first in the directory when we deploy the changes. So, you’d enjoy first-in status; think iLike on a smaller scale.

Sure, Connect is internal to Oracle, but we plan to deploy OpenSocial to Mix eventually. So, your apps may be externally visible too.

Our plans for Mix mean we those of you who aren’t Oracle people can also start thinking about OpenSocial. When we deploy to Mix, we’ll likely seed apps to fill the directory, so I’ll probably be repeating this message.

What do you think about all this, i.e. OpenSocial on Connect/Mix, what apps we should have, how can you help?

Find the comments.

Comments are down, so either this is exceedingly dull to you, or you completely agree and have nothing to add. Either way, as we move forward with our plan to deploy Connect as an OpenSocial container and update the UI to support OpenSocial apps, I’m going to keep blogging about our progress.

A few reasons:

1. Oracle people read here (maybe just the iPhone stuff) and use Connect. I’d like you guys to know what’s coming.
2. What we deploy to Connect will eventually make it to Mix, and I’d like you guys to know what’s coming too.
3. I like the transparent model. Involving your users during design and development helps the beta launch get closer to what people really want, or at least what they think they want.
4. I don’t want to just talk about stuff in a vacuum. This way you can see that we’re actually working, or at least Rich is.
5. IMHO agile development works even better if you can start the feedback loop earlier, rather than waiting for beta.
6. Mix and Connect have been out for a while now, so the platform’s core feature set is pretty well known. We’re not starting from scratch, so your feedback will be based on experience.

Rich has been using Skitch to post screen captures of his mockups. Skitch is a great little (Mac only) tool that captures and uploads your shots. You can edit them as well, awesome little tool. The Jing Project provides similar functionality for Windows (and Mac). As for Linux, I’m looking for something, so if you know of a replacement, drop a note in comments.

Anyway, as Rich finishes his mockups, he’s uploading them to Skitch. You can subscribe to his new images feed and leave comments on the image pages. Very cool.

His latest mockup is the OpenSocial app directory page. Check it out here on Skitch.

Rich has great UI chops, which is why he does mockups. He’s overhauling the whole look and feel of Connect. We plan to dump the tabs in favor of an expandable, left-hand nav, similar to what Amazon does here; hover over “Shop All Departments” to open the nav. Nothing wrong with borrowing design elements you admire.

A couple people have commented that the new Connect UI is a step backwards for us. It was thrown together pretty quickly, loosely modeled after the blue Fusion middleware/EBS R12/PeopleSoft color schemes. The only goal I had was to make it obviously different from Mix; the original Connect UI, which was more popular, used a similar red/white motif, making it a bit hard to differentiate for first-timers.

This is more my fault than anyone else’s, since I pushed for the UI to be different. Look for Rich to sharpen up the UI in the next update.

Stay tuned for more mockups as we progress. Find the comments here or over on Skitch to let us know what you think.

This is great chance to help us build the next version of the platform and influence future versions of Connect and Mix.

ENTP has been working to fix bugs and build features for Marketing that will be showcased heading into OpenWorld.

Last night, a slew of bug fixes and a new feature or two were deployed to Mix. If you’re a regular Mix user, you might want to bounce over and check out the new stuff, or if you’ve hit any of the bugs listed in the past, rejoice!

New Features
The shiny new feature released last night is group chat. Each group now has a persistent chat room that you can join for ad hoc conversations with anyone who happens to be there.

Also, group administrators can schedule group chats, designate panel members for the chat and invite people to attend.

To check out the chat feature, go to one of your groups and click the Upcoming Chats tab.

A less shiny, but useful new feature is the streamlining of notifications. All notifications (group invitations, network invitations, comments received, requests to join a private group, etc.) now go into your direct message inbox. You can control how often you receive an email reminder of these notifications using the new digest option on your profile.

Bug Fixes
The deploy also fixed a few nagging bugs:

• Joining a group took a long time and if you clicked multiple times, you joined multiple times.
• Search results included private group posts in the count, but no private items were displayed. This was a bit confusing if you didn’t have access to the private results.
• Some questions were redirecting to the Q&A page when you clicked the link.
• Failing to close an HTML tag inside the comment field caused some interesting behavior.
• HTML entered into a comment was stripped out when the item showed up in the Activity Log.
• The Activity Log wasn’t showing group information like other information, e.g. links to profiles and timestamps were missing.
• People were able to accept invitations to private groups more than once.
• The Activity Log on a group page wasn’t showing very interesting information.
• Deleting messages from your direct messages inbox without opening them first caused the Inbox icon to continue to count them as unread.

Expect more frequent changes to Mix over the next few months. We had a long gap between deployments, but I think Marketing’s plan it to deploy Tuesdays and Thursdays, which should keep the new features and bug fixes flowing.

Thanks to Marketing and ENTP for working on Mix while we focus on Connect.

He has expanded his pet project, OraTweet, to include OraTweetBot, which he says is:

. . . an XMPP/Jabber bot built with Java that will listen for tweets and post them to Twitter or to a database.

I never use the XMPP/IM Twitter integration, but I know it’s more popular than any client out there. And I know it’s been super flakey for months, even by Twitter standards. Well, apparently, Noel’s OraTweetBot can take its place.

But wait, there’s more. You can hook OraTweetBot to your database, and have it post to Twitter, basically your automating tweets. Noel goes on to say:

The big advantage of this is that you can actually map twitter users to a users table on the db and send on their behalf.

Hmm. I guess if you’re using the bot as a buffer for Twitter, i.e. posting in batch in case Twitter has taken a nap. Posting tweets on people’s behalf seems a bit odd, but I assume he means proxying people’s tweets and not impersonating them

Anyway, very cool stuff. This is another APEX community contribution, at least OraTweet is, and Noel is an APEX guy. Those APEX people are having a big week.

So, nobody said boo when I talked about OpenSocial earlier this week, but here’s another reason OpenSocial is going to kick ass when we get it deployed. Noel originally approached me to find a home for OraTweet, ideally on Connect, but it’s written in APEX. Connect is JRuby, so we couldn’t really make it work.

Plus, not that many people have Twitter accounts; have a seat, it’s true. So, adding a Twitter client to the platform wouldn’t appeal to that many of our users.

With OpenSocial, Noel can create OraTweet as an app. OpenSocial is language agnostic, so OraTweet doesn’t need to be rewritten. People add apps they want to use, so there’s no impact to the platform. And bonus, all the data for OraTweet stay on Noel’s servers.

This is why OpenSocial makes sense for us. It allows developers to leverage our network and the social effects of it to spread their apps, and it allows them to develop in their language of choice on their own hardware.

Everybody wins.

I noticed David and Frank chimed in on Noel’s OraTweet post asking him for the URL to test it out; as an OpenSocial app, if I installed OraTweet, my Activity Log would show this. David and Frank and all my other contacts would see this. The Twitter users in my contacts would probably be interested to test out OraTweet.

This is the network effect, much more efficient than asynchronous commenting/replying or using email to spread your app.

OpenSocial is the future for our platform. We can’t possibly build all the enhancements people want into the platform, and frankly, this doesn’t make sense. OpenSocial lets other teams add the enhancements they want, leveraging their development skills.

We’re hoping to get all the container, architecture and UI work done sometime in late Fall. We plan to deploy to Connect first, work out the kinks, then move it to Mix.

What do you think? Are you totally geeked out of your mind? Doubtful. Leave a comment anyway. Everyone has an opinion.

First off, thanks to everyone who submitted a session idea. There were 281 submitted before the deadline, and someone even figured out how to create a session after we closed the nomination form. Bonus points for ingenuity.

Now that it’s over, what worked?

Promote Early and Often
As I noted a week after we opened nominations, the UI wasn’t supporting a very fair distribution of ideas, since the only two views we offered were Latest and Greatest, leaving a gap of underserved ideas.

This is something we planned to address (seriously), but we got pulled off Mix onto Connect. So, the time ticked away, and we never got a good filtering UI deployed. This will be a must for next year, if the Events team decides to renew the program.

People adjusted though. Rather than relying on the flawed UI, many session owners promoted early and often through blogs, Twitter, the Oracle Community, and through the Mix social network (w00t! for network effects).

I watched all this promotion through Mix, Google Alerts and Summize, and I have to say I’m impressed. The Events team offered up something valuable, and people went after it with vigor.

I think one person deserves special recognition for his promotional efforts: Steve Stein from Perot Systems Consulting. Steve’s session idea made the top five even though he submitted it less than a month before the voting deadline.

Only one other idea submitted with less than a month lead time made the top 25. Steve waged a short, but effective, promotional war, leveraging his network of 531 people and even creating a blog specifically for his presentation topic.

Anyway, Steve’s example shows that promotion was key to making the top 25. All it took was 58 votes to get selected so every single vote counted.

Stay on the First Page, Above the Fold
I’ve heard a few comments that submitting too early was a bad idea (and yes, the UI is partially responsible), but I disagree. My session idea was one of the first because we needed to seed a few ideas before going live. I did no promotion, other than in the first blog post announcing the program.

And I still got within 7 votes of making the cut.

Being first in allowed my idea to get votes longer, but this wasn’t enough on its own. For quite some time, my session idea was at the top. What really hurt it overall was when it fell below the fold and off the first page of Greatest ideas, and this isn’t an issue that better filtering can completely solve.

I think most people either: a) voted specifically for an idea they saw promoted somewhere and/or b) voted for a few interesting ones on the first page, mainly above the fold. This is a variaton of the Google effect, i.e. if you’re not on the first page of Google results, you don’t exist. We tried to mitigate this by expanding the pages to 50 ideas, but that doesn’t help the below the fold problem.

Food for thought next year. Use promotion to keep these pole positions and you’re in good shape.

Be Controversial (Ahem) Interesting
I’m convinced another reason my session floated toward the top for as long as it did was because it had “porn” in the title.

But if that’s not enough to convince you that controversy works, what about “BEA Aqualogic versus Oracle Fusion Middleware shoot out“? This idea finished second, although I’m not exactly sure how it didn’t finish first by a landslide.

The timing was perfect for it too, since the BEA acquisition closed in late April, and all those newly-minted Oracle employees discovered Mix and the suggest a session program.

Don’t try to tell me this session didn’t garner 50% or more of its votes due to its potentially controversial content, using the term “shoot out” certainly helped.

I’ll be surprised if this isn’t one of the top sessions attended at OpenWorld. Kudos to Lonneke Dikmans who may be the star of OOW 2008.

Anyway, refer back to the drive by voters who casually voted for sessions on the first page, above the fold. Guess which sessions drew their attention?

Use Your Star Power
This goes hand-in-hand with promotion, and I don’t think it’s accidental that well-known, Oracle experts like Eddie Awad, Richard Foote, Chris Muir and Dan Norris made the list.

Disclaimer: I’m not that knowledgeable about all the Oracle experts out there, so please don’t flame me for not mentioning someone as an expert.

Moving on, these experts are popular for a reason, which I’m sure helped their sessions garner votes. If you read Eddie’s blog or you’ve seen Dan speak at a conference, you’re likely to vote up their sessions because they are known quantities.

Of course, on the flip-side, the open nature of the program allows people to see fresh faces present too, which is also a good thing.

Go with APEX
This logic may not work every year, but wow, did it ever work this year. Seven of the top 25 session ideas were APEX-related. I’m sure Carl is glowing right now.

What is it about APEX? Maybe Carl or someone else can clue me in by commenting. I wonder if this will be a trend going forward, i.e. product-based communities storming the voting to push their sessions to the top.

Nothing wrong with that, just interesting, and it says a lot about the APEX community and how involved they are. Kudos.

So, these are the nuggets I’ve seen. Overall, I’m pleased with the experiment.

It’s worth noting that OpenWorld 2008 will be the first (AFAIK) vendor-sponsored conference to include community-voted sessions. and by community, I mean anyone, not just attendees or special-interest groups, since Mix is an open community that anyone can join.

Let’s pause to thank Marketing for making this happen, and bonus points for not censoring the controversial topics.

This is also your chance to sound off about anything you liked, disliked thought was unfair, etc.

Find the comments.

Anyway, Paul called us all together to hunker down on some design work. Well, some new design and some redesign.

If you’re interested in the future of the Connect and eventually Mix versions of our as yet unamed platform read on, and by all means, add your two cents.

We have two big projects right now.

1. Finishing OpenSocial
2. Redesigning groups

Doesn’t seem like a lot, but there are a lot of moving parts. Anthony has had the OpenSocial 0.8 Shindig container implemented for a while, but we’ve been lagging on packaging up the UI pieces. Here are some of the pieces we need to design and build specifically for OpenSocial:

• A repository or gallery of OpenSocial apps
• A preview page for each app in the repository
• A page to submit an app for inclusion in the repository

We also need to package up a sandbox environment and populate it with developer toys for enterprising new OpenSocial developers. That’s not a must have right now, but it should come soon after we deploy the new stuff.

So, not that you can browse and view apps, now what? We also need to jazz up the profile and home pages, which are in dire need of some TLC. Plus, we know groups needs a makeover, too; Paul has been wanting to do that since we launched Mix. So, add to the list:

• Redesigned profile page to support OpenSocial apps
• Redesigned home page to support OpenSocial apps
• Redesigned groups page to showcase activity in your groups
• Redesigned group home page, with a dash of obvious

On top of all that, we’ll be thinking about how to do a Files app. We’re hoping to support both Beehive and Stellent, if I could get Billy’s attention, maybe that would go faster.

Lots of changes. Curious, well check out the rough thoughts Rich put down today. Poor guy is the mockup machine and the UI guy, although I suspect he’ll want my help, such as it is.

Here’s a shot of the changes to the profile page:

Like that? How about these changes to the groups page?

For the OpenSocial stuff, we have some examples to borrow from, e.g. iGoogle, MySpace, orkut, Facebook, so I think we’ll come up with something that works well. The individual group pages will be more focused, no more “Post a topic” and pick from idea, question and blog post. That’s always been a bit confusing to everyone.

We’re going to emphasize the collaborative aspects, and in that spirit, sound off with your thoughts on the Mix/Connect UI pieces we’re redesigning. What do you think of the plans? Do you like where we’re going? Would you add/remove something or change the focus?

Find the comments.