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 [...]

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 [...]

Customer Service that Works

I’ve covered this topic twice before, but it really deserves more airtime.
Paul’s summary of Under the Radar on Monday received comments from two of the companies he mentioned, from the CEOs of those companies. You read that right.
Similarly, my most recent post on FriendFeed got a comment from one of the founders.
This doesn’t mean that [...]

Spring Conferences

We’ve been pretty busy with conferences lately, and that looks to continue into the Summer.
Paul attended Under the Radar The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work last week, and I think he’s working on a post summarizing his thoughts.
Rich spoke at the JRuby Meetup a few weeks ago, and Anthony [...]

FriendFeed is for Lurkers too

If you missed it, over the weekend, there was quite a testy blog war between Louis Gray and Duncan Riley, ostensibly started by FriendFeed or rather differing opinions of it. Short version: Duncan doesn’t find value, Louis disagrees, obscenities ensue. Makes for a good read.
FriendFeed has been all the rage lately among the usual suspects [...]

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 [...]

Twitter as Customer Support

I’ve blogged in the past about the good new web marketing, i.e. how many startups follow mentions of their companies on blogs, respond in those blogs and engage the bloggers. I really like the personal touch, even if I don’t care much for the application or don’t even use it.
Twitter has added a new dimension [...]

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 [...]

DIY Development

The WSJ Business Technology blog has a post about “Where the Next Generation of Techies Won’t Come from“. Aside from offending my grammatical sensibilities, you know, ending a sentence with a preposition, the post interests me for a couple reasons.
The crux of the post refers to statistics published by the Computer Research Association that show [...]

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: [...]

Do You Know Robert?

It’s funny how micro-focused I can get. I am continually reminded of how much I live in a bubble world, and it’s always nice to have that bubble popped.
Working in technology, I tend to assume that other people are geeky like me. They have Tivo, broadband, Macs, iPhones, blogs, hundreds of “friends” on Facebook/Twitter/network du [...]

Perspective, FriendFried and the Scoble Effect

I’m having trouble getting back into the swing of blogging after taking a nice relaxing vacation. When you spend all day eating and breathing technology, it’s always good to step back and realize what else is out there.
Here at the ‘Lab, we consume New Web all day long, and spend a whole lot of time [...]

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 [...]

I Heart TripIt

So, I’m going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Keep reading if you care.
Coincidentally, I’ve been messing with two travel-targeted social networks lately, so it’s fitting that my last post before a trip would be about TripIt and Dopplr, less so.
These are niche networks, an ever-more common phenomenon; as horizontal social networks like Facebook and [...]

The Long Tail of Meetings

This tweet from friend of the ‘Lab Michael Krigsman triggered my inner economist.

Even though I’m essentially a geek, I studied economics in college and have always been fascinated by supply, demand, utility and especially modeling that stuff with a nice tidy graph. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Chris Anderson and his Long [...]

Because We Care

Here at the ‘Lab, we listen to you. When you wanted more, we gave you more.
So, when I got a suggestion from Jim, I listened. Jim wanted us to provide email subscriptions to this blog, like Steven Chan does, so that he could stay informed when new content is available, on his terms.
This is a [...]

Thoughts on Microsoft-Yahoo

I’ve been thinking about the proposed Yahoo-Microsoft merger since the news broke on Friday. As a closeted economist and enterprise apologist, the offer’s value really jumped off the page. Microsoft is offering $44.5 billion in cash and stock for a business that generated just under $7 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2007. Microsoft’s Office [...]

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 [...]

Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit Recap

So, I’m back from San Francisco and the summit. Justin blogged several times already about the summit, and he even has video of yours truly, which I won’t embed here because I hate the sound of my voice. Click over to his post to viddie it.
This post is a collection of my thoughts and observations [...]