The Oracle Mix Blog

I was doing a little bit of egosurfing for Oracle Mix last night (you know, see what people have been saying on blogs, on Twitter etc.) and came across a few interesting tidbits on Delicious.

The site has been bookmarked 194 times since its launch in November of 2007. The top 10 tags used to describe Mix are as follows (number of occurences in parentheses):

• oracle (127)
• community (60)
• web2.0 (51)
• jruby (35)
• programming (28)
• social (25)
• rails (23)
• rubyonrails (20)
• socialnetworking (15)
• enterprise2.0 (14)

A few people add notes to their bookmarks. Here are a few recent ones:

Oracle's crowdsourcing site to get public input (ddjuplin)

A customer community created by Oracle on Ruby on Rails. Has 40K members. A good example of building a community before your users do it for you. (Dion Hinchcliffe)

Another big company gets on the idea capture bandwagon (Aden Davies)

Pretty accurate, all in all (though to be honest, we're still only at a little over 30,000 registered members).

Delicious is one of many ways we try to listen to what people are saying about Mix, so we'll keep an eye on it.

Aside from evaluating new feature ideas, we've also started to look at numbers more closely. We wanted to know where Mix stands in terms of its size, adoption rate, user activity levels etc.

For purposes of this high-level assessment, we looked at the following five key areas:

Membership

This includes measuring the total number of registered members as well as that portion that can be considered active.

Mix has been growing steadily in 2008 to currently a little over 31,000 members. Growth peaked around Oracle OpenWorld '08 and has slowed since. About one third of registered members are Oracle employees. As of November, when we took a snapshot, the number of active users (as defined as those who have logged in at least once over a 30-day period) was at a fairly low 7%. Definitely something we need to work on going forward.

Traffic

Your basic web metrics: page views, session visits, time spent etc.

Thanks to some of the integration that happened leading up to Oracle OpenWorld '08, we saw a big spike in traffic, reaching almost 250,000 page views in September. Things have slowed down again since then. Traffic per 1,000 users has been trending downward all year, another thing we'd like to reverse in 2009.

User-generated content

Right now, the main two items people can contribute on Mix are questions and ideas. But they can also leave comments and answers, vote on ideas, share notes within their groups or send messages to people in their networks.

The activity levels here correspond to what we see in terms of traffic: a significant spike around OpenWorld '08, some slowing down since then, and a continuing downward trend in contributions per 1,000 users.

Social network

In order to understand how "networked" our members are, we looked at the number of connections per user, the number of group memberships per user as well as the groups themselves (size, activity etc.).

There's definitely a lot of power law stuff going on. A small number of users account for a large number of connections, while the majority of users don't have any connections at all. Similarly, a very small number of groups account for a large number of group memberships while many groups have only ten or fewer members (not that small groups are a bad thing per se, necessarily, but it may point to some issues with our matchmaking capabilities).

Community behavior

Last but not least, we looked at how well-behaved the Mix community is. Things have been very good so far (no spam, no abuse etc.). That's a great asset, in my view, and we'll try to further build on that as we grow Mix.

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As we build out the Oracle Mix roadmap for 2009, more metrics will have to be added in order to measure progress against specific goals. To the extent that these numbers are ok for public consumption, we'll try to share them as freely and as regularly as possible.

If you're a metrics buff yourself or would like to learn more about the inner workings of Mix, drop us a line in the comments and we'll see if we can dig something up for you.

For the first time in almost two months we released a few minor changes to Oracle Mix tonight (all on the backend, nothing for you to see yet):

Merge accounts

It happens occasionally that users create two accounts on Mix (but only want to use one of them). This feature allows us to merge duplicate accounts in a clean fashion, keeping content and network information from both.

Human vs. system messages

Mix provides some light-weight messaging capability: There's an inbox, you can send private messages to one or more people in your network etc. Of course, the system also sends out a bunch of stuff (invitations, confirmations, notifications etc.). This feature allows us to track what portion of all direct messages sent across Mix are actually person-to-person (another metric we will monitor that will help us asses how Mix is doing overall).

Last login timestamp

It's essential for us to know how many people on Mix are actually active (for the time being, we've settled for a fairly low threshold and consider anyone an active user who has logged in at least once over the past 30 days). This new timestamp gives us precise data to work with (before, we had to rely on a slighly inaccurate work-around number).

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Oh, and our staging environment is now running on new and improved hardware.

If you find any bugs, please let us know in the comments below or via the feedback form on Mix (requires login). Thanks!

Tonight's deployment included the following two items:

• Fixed a bug that prevented one user from opening his inbox.
• Added a footer to a couple of email notifications (welcome email, digest) to include various ways we can be contacted (email, blog, Twitter etc.).

Still a lot of prep work being done in the background at the moment. Hopefully, we'll get to more substantial things very shortly.

For those of you living on the cutting edge of the social web, you can follow Oracle Mix on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oraclemix

What is Twitter? Here's how they describe it in their own words:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

According to Wikipedia:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications ... Twitter had by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month.

Why do we find Twitter useful?

Well, there's a growing number of people on it, many of whom are thought leaders in their respective fields (and often quite web-savvy). Twitter allows us to plug into a kind of ambient conversation with our community. We listen to what people are saying about us (good and bad) and can chime in or provide support whenever necessary. We can also keep people in the loop about what we're up to in a light and fairly unobtrusive manner.

If you haven't played with Twitter yet but want to give it a spin, see our wiki for a list of over 100 Oracle Tweeters to help get you started.

Today's deployment included the following:

• Fixed a bug that prevented one of our group administrators from approving group join requests.
• Added yesterday's email footer to another notification (direct messages) to help promote the different channels through which people can get in touch with us (currently the feedback form, email, this blog and Twitter). We hope to see a gradual increase in feedback, number of Twitter followers as well as blog activity.
• Added a thank you message to our feedback form (cause we really do appreciate your comments).

Have a nice (long) weekend!

One of the things we'll focus on over the next few weeks is to provide a few first improvements to the group functionality on Mix.

There are currently more than 900 groups on Mix, though a large portion of them only have a handful of members and little to no activity as far as we can tell (an activity meter for groups will be in the works shortly as part ouf our metrics dashboard). There are also a good number of pretty big and active groups around all kinds of Oracle-related topics.

In addition to the feedback we've received last year, we wanted to know from some of the administrators of these bigger and more active groups what they think is missing from Mix that would help them better achieve their goals.

We have identified a few dozen leaders among our admins who either

• manage a group of 100 or more members,
• manage three or more groups or
• have recently started a group that's grown quickly in size.

Today, we're asking them to let us know what features they want to see us implement over the next few months. Even though we think we have a pretty good idea of what's needed to make groups more useful for everybody, it's always good to get some validation.

We'll share their feedback next week. We also plan to reach out to other Mix members (e.g. newly registered users, very active users, users who haven't logged in in a while etc.) to hear their views.

If you're a group administrator on Mix who is not included in our sample, feel free to take part in the comments below. We'd like to know:

• What is your group (or your groups) about and what are you trying to achieve?
• How could Mix support you better?
• What are the three things we should focus on over the next three months?

We look forward to hearing from you.

We had some maintenance work scheduled for tonight.

The site was taken offline some time after 5pm Pacific and should be back by 7pm.

Apologies for the late notice.

Last week, we invited 85 of our group administrators to give us some feedback on Oracle Mix, how they use it and how we might be able to improve it for them.

We had about a 35% response rate to our open questionnaire. The answers validated a lot of what we already knew but also contained a few interesting suggestions and ideas which we'll look into.

Below is a summary of the responses.

What is your group about?

Some examples of the kind of groups people are involved with:

• Advisory board group
• Regional groups for partners (e.g. APAC CRM partners)
• Product-related groups for customers and interested Oracle employees
• Groups for Field Marketing event attendees
• Virtual communities in the Sales/Pre-Sales world
• User groups
• Groups for specific IT topic areas (eg. SOA/BPM, Architecture)
• Forum for Oracle E-Business Suite users
• Groups around certain products
• Groups for evangelizing social technology, Enterprise 2.0 in Japan

What are you trying to achieve?

No big surprises here:

• Get people together around a product, a place, or an existing (external from Oracle) group.
• Bridge customers and product users with product development.
• Manage feature recommendation and steering.
• Allow partners to communicate and share ideas and experiences on CRM products.
• Provide a forum for both Oracle and Oracle partners for information sharing, idea sharing, networking.
• Interact with clients around products.
• Manage input from clients and employees for certain events.
• Provide pre-event information and follow-up.
• Communicate meeting schedule/details and upcoming topics to select customers and provide general archive.
• Getting to know people better, enable better communication and collaborative working.
• Provide a knowledge warehouses for JDE experts.
• Share knowledge and grow a community where people learn from each other.
• Network, share ideas, ask questions, and mostly just further knowledge by harnessing the power of the whole group.
• Simply maintain an extension on Mix to existing websites of a certain community or group.
• Provide a community component to a podcast series.

How could Mix support you better? What are the three things we should focus on over the next three months?

Here's the list of ideas and requests that were mentioned more than once:

• Improved activity log and easier ways to receive updates (9)
• Content sharing (file embedding, RSS import) (7)
• Better involvement of internal Oracle people (4)
• File upload (4)
• Better marketing of Oracle Mix (incl. better support and guidance how to use it) (3)
• Rich-text editor (2)
• Easier login process (incl. making more information publicly available) (2)
• Better options for management of group members (2)
• Avoid duplicate email notifications (2)
• Ability for group administrators to notify all group members (2)
• Integration with external sites or services (both Oracle and non-Oracle) (2)
• Improved search capabilities (incl. group-specific search) (2)

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Thanks to all who participated. All in all, this is very much in line with the general feedback we have received. I will share details about our plans for February shortly. Looks like we might be able to get a few of these items checked off fairly soon.