Kick People out of Your Groups

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 [...]

Suggest a Session is a Hit

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 [...]

Suggest a Session Topic for OpenWorld

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 [...]

OpenWorld 2008 Registration Opens

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 [...]

Good UI or New Web Hubris?

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 [...]

What’s Next?

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 [...]

Mix Messaging

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 [...]

AppsLab: Year One

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 [...]

April Fools’ on Mix?

The Mix traffic stats from today show more than double the pageviews (8,200) and visits (1,000) we normally get.
These numbers are as of an hour ago, so they will continue to climb slightly as the day comes to a close. They are the highest that I can recall since we launched at OpenWorld in November [...]

The Greatest Idea Moves Closer to Fruition

I haven’t done post on the most popular ideas on Mix since November. Back then, they were:
1. We need the Oracle clients (OCI, JDBC) for the Apple Intel OSX platform
2. Compile Oracle XE for Intel OS X
Well, guess what? Since November, the same two ideas have stayed at 1 and 2. If you’re interested, rounding [...]

Does Spam Irritate You?

Mix is reaching more people now, especially through groups. This is great because we always thought groups would be the best way to draw people into the network and conversation. Implied levels of trust within a group make it easier to engage and provide value to people who ordinarily have no use for social networks [...]

More Fun with Numbers

Rich and Anthony deployed a few key fixes last week, nothing too bloggable. They were focused on securing private group activity and caching, which was causing some weird behavior. So, rather than blog those, my periodic Mix post this week is more metrics.
As a follow up to my first Fun with Numbers post, I did [...]

Polishing Mix Groups

Rich and Anthony deployed a boat load of fixes and enhancements to Mix on Friday night.
I might have mentioned before the Mix is going to be used more by internal teams, so we addressed groups with this deployment for the most part.
Some of these are bug fixes that have been needed for a while, so [...]

Fun with Numbers, Mix Edition

Still feeling gravity’s pull lately, and Rich and Anthony gave me access to the Mix database this week. So, rather than review some new service (like Orgoo, for which I just got my beta invite) or wax philosophically about a New Web topic, I figured I’d dust off the SQL and crunch some numbers.
Side note: [...]

Mix Gets a Plug at Google

Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, who worked with Rich on the initial development of Mix last Fall, gave a tech talk at Google last week on “JRuby: The power of Java and Ruby“. He mentions Mix at about minute 61 and talks briefly about the project, built on the “red stack”, i.e. JRuby running on Oracle [...]

The Wall Comes Down and Other Mix Changes

It’s a busy week for Mix. Monday, Rich and Anthony upgraded to JRuby 1.1RC2 and made a bunch of UI changes. Has anyone else noticed that Mix is faster?
Last night, Anthony (Rich took some well-deserved time off) deployed a new set of changes, including one that has been requested quite frequently. We took down the [...]

Is Mix a Beautiful Object?

I guess we’ll see. Steve Jobs joined Mix on Wednesday. No kidding, here’s his profile.
Is it the man himself? Or perhaps Dan Lyons in character? Maybe some dude named Steve Jobs who is neither the founder and CEO of Apple nor the editor guy at Forbes who used to be funny and currently is just [...]

Notes and New Blogs

So, I have returned from vacation on Hawai’i, a.k.a. da Big Island.
Yes, it ruled, and yes, I’m suffering from post-vacation hangover. If you’re ever there and want an absolute thrill, take a doors-off helicopter ride up to the molten lava flowing at Kilauea. When the helicopter turns to your side, there’s only a shoulder belt [...]

Mix President’s Day Release: JRuby 1.1RC2 and a bunch of other stuff!

Since U.S. based Oracle employees don’t get President’s Day off, Anthony and I decided to deploy some new changes while everyone is off enjoying their day off.  Actually, that’s not true, we deployed the new Mix changes early Sunday morning.  What should have taken 10 minutes lasted 2 hours — it was a big release.
We [...]

OracleCommunity.net Arrives

Lost in the frenzy of last week’s travel to the Bay Area and the Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit, I neglected to mention Eddie’s brand-spanking new OracleCommunity.net, a “social network for Oracle people” hosted on Ning. I know I’m late to the party, since OraNA tells me it’s been covered here, here, here, here sort of [...]