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 [...]
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 [...]
A year ago was my first day at AppsLab. Paul and I huddled (virtually) to talk about plans for the team. It was exciting stuff. We had a unique opportunity to operate like a startup within the bowels of a huge corporation.
We had simple plans that I used a mnemonic device to remember, the three [...]
Written by Jake.
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To usher out 2007, it’s time to do the retrospective. Cue the music.
Looking back on this past year elicits “wow” moments for me. This time last year, I worked in a different team, Fusion Financials Strategy; I was neck-deep in the requirements for Secure Enterprise Search integration into Apps. I lived in a different state, [...]
Written by Jake.
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Craig Cmehil, Ethan Jewett and I had an interesting conversation (over Twitter, natch) earlier today about demand for New Web tools like Twitter, social networking, social bookmarking inside the firewall.
Twitter’s 140 character limitation sometimes leads to convolution, but I think the core question was how do you approach internal demand for these tools? From the [...]
Written by Jake.
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When we started our Connect experiment in August, one goal we had for the project was to engage the tens of thousands of technical folks at Oracle in something new. We call it OpenLab, and it’s run like an Open Source project within Oracle. The only thing we ask participants to do is use free [...]
Written by Jake.
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All the good names may be gone.
Reading this piece in Business Week on Google’s orkut and their plans for social domination, I figured it was finally time to give orkut a test drive to see what all the excitamento or halachala (I hope these are close) was all about.
Orkut is wildly popular in Latin [...]
Written by Jake.
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The term social networking, like blog, has a fluffy connotation. Because its adoption began with young people through MySpace, many people assume that social networks are toys and time-sinks. Actually, they are correct on both accounts.
However, as working stiffs like yours truly and people who understand us immerse ourselves in social networks, new uses for [...]
Written by Jake.
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Recent coverage (NYT, Mashable) of FriendFeed reminded me of discussions we’ve had about Connect features. Basically, FriendFeed applies the Facebook News Feed feature to the entire Interwebs, or at the 23 services they integrate with today.
You have a(nother) network of friends. Everyone posts stuff to the FriendFeed, which aggregates the posts into a river of [...]
Written by Jake.
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ZDNet has posted a short snippet of Paul’s commentary about Connect, after Dan Farber quizzed (and needled) him.
I lol’d when Paul said he had a team of developers who are web savvy. Rich apparently has cloned himself. Woo-hoo! Either that or I am now a web developer . . . bah?
Written by Jake.
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A couple recent nuggets reminded me of Paul’s post on trust and underlined the reasons why Web 2.0 can never be Enterprise 2.0. With Connect, we’ve come upon a new (at least to us) dimension of the social network, i.e. the explicit trust created by working together. Paul says:
When we inject trust into the equation. [...]
Written by Jake.
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I guess the Office 2.0 Conference made this relevant last week, but I noticed several articles that kicked IT in the teeth for holding back the inevitable advance of new web into the enterprise, i.e. Web 2.0 transforming into Enterprise 2.0.
Chris Anderson of “the long tail” fame and Computer World each had pieces on how [...]
Written by Jake.
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I’ve spent the majority of my Life 2.0 using SaaS (Software as a Service), not producing it, but now that Connect is live and has users, I’m getting a taste for the production side of the house.
Ask anyone savvy, like Anshu, about the benefits of SaaS, and dollars to donuts says “seamless new feature and [...]
Written by Jake.
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Effectively immediately, nothing will be banned.
The Summer of Facebook has brought a new list of social network (sorry Mark, social utility) bans, as well as some fuzzy research on the cost of social networking. Some interesting points:
Does anyone really believe that Facebook alone costs the Australian economy $5 billion?
The Sophos study says that 43% of [...]
Written by Jake.
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Recently, Paul was telling me about a conversation he had with an internal product team about Connect. The conversation went something like this:
Product Manager: We love what you’re doing with Connect, and we want to learn more about it. Are your design documents online?
Paul: We don’t have any design documents.
PM: How did you know [...]
Written by Jake.
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Since we launched Connect alpha about three weeks ago, Rich has been adding new features in stealth mode leading up to our beta release, which should be finished sometime this week. We weren’t promoting the new features, just to see how people adopted them. This gave us a nice viral study, and it pointed out [...]
