The Oracle Mix Blog

Every Wednesday, we take a look at the five "hottest groups" on Mix. Here they are:

• DBA -- Oracle Database Administration. For all Oracle DBA's, experienced or not, gigabyte or petabyte ;-) It's an open group, you don't need to be invited to join. (1714 members)
• Oracle Certification -- This group is for all holding Oracle Certified Professional (OCP), Oracle Certified Expert (OCE), Oracle Certified Associate (OCA), and Oracle Certified Master (OCM) credentials, as well as those pursuing their certification. A forum to share exam preparation tips, study materials, practice... (549 members)
• E-Business Suite -- Group dedicated to discussing issues, sharing ideas and communicating about the Oracle E-Business Suite (1,739 members)
• PeopleTools -- PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools. Covering the PeopleSoft technology stack, developer tools, PeopleCode, BI tools and integration technology. A group for developers and infrastructure analysts. (410 members)
• PeopleSoft -- Everything about PeopleSoft related Tools, PSadmin etc. (502 members)

Our algorithm looks at growth rate and group activity. Just get those two going for the positive and your group will show up here in no time.

To view the complete list, go here: Oracle Mix hot groups

Today, we presented Twitter's new list feature at our weekly MarketingLab meeting. Here's a couple of things I highlighted.

1. Word cloud of list names to which @oracle has been added

Word cloud created with the ever-amazing Wordle.net

The key terms are all pretty obvious ones, but in the future who knows what names people will give us.

2. Top 10 most-followed lists to which @oracle has been added

I expect this list to change quite a bit over the coming weeks and month as more lists are created by more people. At first sight, there seems to be value in being on popular lists.

* * *

We also talked about useful applications for Oracle-generated lists (like the one we created last week). Let us know if you have any ideas for lists you'd like to see us curate. Thanks!

Our weekly metrics update below. We've added the number of times the @oraclemix account has been added to various Twitter lists.

Registered Mix users (weekly growth)

52,550 (+0.6%)

Active users (percent of total)

Last 30 days: 5,096 (9.7%)
Last 60 days: 8,714 (16.6%)
Last 90 days: 11,864 (22.6%)

Traffic (30-day)

Visits: 11,602
Page views: 58,891

Twitter

Followers: 2,580
List mentions: 41

User-generated content (30-day)

New ideas: 17
New questions: 34
New comments: 175

Groups

There are currently 1,293 Mix groups (requires login).

First of all, I was wrong. You actually can add yourself to your own Twitter lists. Phew!

Here's what we woke up to this morning. Following yesterday's tweet, ten lists have already been created that contain @oraclemix (thanks, everyone!):

A quick look over to the @oracle account showed an even higher uptake at 41 lists.

There are a number of things to keep an eye on: For example, what are people calling the lists they put you on? How many people are following those lists? We're definitely adding "listed how many times" to the things we track.

It will be interesting to watch this unfold as the roll-out of this feature continues and more people play with lists. As always, let us know if you find more use cases that make the most of lists.

This morning we found that Twitter had enabled their new list feature for the @oraclemix account.

Thinking of the obvious, I quickly created the "Oracle" list of currently 23 official Oracle Twitter accounts (btw, that's quite a jump from where we were three months ago).

From A to O, here they are:

• @AgilePLM
• @magazineoracle
• @oracle
• @Oracle_EM
• @OracleArgentina
• @OracleBlogs
• @oraclecert
• @oraclecrm
• @oracledatabase
• @OracleEvents
• @OracleFS
• @oraclehcm
• @OracleHealthSci
• @oracleidm
• @oraclemiddle
• @oraclemix
• @oracleopenworld
• @oraclepartners
• @oracleprofit
• @OracleRetail
• @oracletechnet
• @oracleutilities
• @oraclewebcenter

Here's the list. Let us know what other useful things you could see us doing with lists. Thanks!

Maybe you've heard about it. There's a new thing from Google called Google Wave.

According to Wikipedia:

Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.voiiterytr Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was extended to nearly 1 million users beginning September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite up to twenty additional users.

Since we're always up for trying out new things, we've joined this wave created by the AppsLab. If you're lucky and already have your Wave account, feel free to join us as we try to figure out how this new tool fits in with everything else.

We've also started a new group of Google Wave Users which you're invited to join as well (at 9 members since we launched it few days ago, it already made it on today's hot groups list).

It's Wednesday, time to check out these trending groups on Mix:

• R12COE -- Center of Expertise for Oracle Consulting (57 members)
• External OCSCOE -- Center of Expertise for Oracle Consulting : This group is customer facing and is used for interacting with customers (51 members)
• Development Tools -- Are you a developer, or user of development tools such as PL/SQL, ApplicationExpress (ApEx), java or other languages and tools (even third-party, like PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, Ruby, Rails, TOAD, ER/Studio, ERwin, MySQL, etc)? If so, this is your place to hang out. Join other developers to exchange... (1,241 members)
• Google Wave Users -- This group aims to connect users of Google Wave (http://wave.google.com). The idea is to help each other get invites, share resources and discuss any interesting use cases you discover. (9 members)
• Enterprise Manager -- This is a group for Oracle Enterprise Manager product series. Grid Control (EMGC), Plug-ins and extensibility, Database Control, Application Server Control, etc. (245 members)

Want to see your group on this weekly list? Just invite a few more people and get people talking. Our algorithm will pick up your activity and move you up on the hot list.

To view the complete list, go here: Oracle Mix hot groups

It's Monday, time for our weekly metrics report...

Registered Mix users (weekly growth)

52,251 (+0.7%)

Active users (percent of total)

We're back up to 10% 30-day active users...

Last 30 days: 5,201 (10.0%)
Last 60 days: 8,706 (16.7%)
Last 90 days: 11,982 (22.9%)

Traffic (30-day)

Visits: 11,844
Page views: 64,213

Twitter

Followers: 2,546

User-generated content (30-day)

New ideas: 23
New questions: 38
New comments: 235

Groups

There are currently 1,285 Mix groups (requires login).

As I'm sure you know by now, we're back from Oracle OpenWorld 2009 and are now focusing our attention on Mix yet once again.

Over the coming 100 days, we'd like to give Mix a major push. This includes (but probably won't be limited to) the following:

• Rolling out several ready-to-go features which we didn't get a chance to deploy in time for OpenWorld
• Implementing a few important infrastructure changes (we'll talk about those in more detail later)
• Cleaning up our backlog of bugfixes and minor improvements
• Revamping our feedback management process
• Updating the Mix roadmap as we head into 2010 (and get started on implementing the first few iterations)

Especially with regard to this last piece, we'd like ask for your help. Following our efforts earlier this year to solicit input from our key group admins, we want you to tell us where you want us to take Mix in the next year.

When Mix launched in 2007, it didn't come fully baked. It was a prototype of something potentially much bigger, but the feature set we've managed to implement since then is still lacking behind what most people expect from a social network today (Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing being prominent sites Mix is commonly being compared to).

So with that, why don't you tell us where you want Mix to be headed? What's your biggest gripe? Where do you see the most promising usecases? We'll figure out a way to capture and organize this feedback in a more structure way, but for now please go ahead an leave us a comment here. If you've already made a feature request or posted an idea for improvement on Mix, please make sure you link to it so people can follow up.

Thank you, and enjoy your weekend!

I'm noticing the usual suspects are showing up too often on this list. Maybe we need to calibrate our algorithm a bit...

• Enterprise Manager Desktop Widgets -- "Widgets" are downloadable Rich Internet Applications that exposes EM Grid Control functionality on the desktop. This group is for you to provide feedback and vote on a series of widgets that we are building or should build. (18 members)
• E-Business Suite -- Group dedicated to discussing issues, sharing ideas and communicating about the Oracle E-Business Suite (1,717 members)
• PeopleTools -- PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools. Covering the PeopleSoft technology stack, developer tools, PeopleCode, BI tools and integration technology. A group for developers and infrastructure analysts. (392 members)
• PeopleSoft -- Everything about PeopleSoft related Tools, PSadmin etc. (488 members)
• DBA -- Oracle Database Administration. For all Oracle DBA's, experienced or not, gigabyte or petabyte ;-) It's an open group, you don't need to be invited to join. (1,678 members)

To view the complete list, go here: Oracle Mix hot groups