The Oracle Mix Blog

Fact: Oracle does a ton of events each year all around the world. The number must range in the thousands, probably. That's a lot of touchpoints, a lot of people making connections etc.

Up until now, you could see the official list or Oracle events at events.oracle.com. Well, you still can, but we're about to make the events calendar a lot more social by bringing it into Mix.

Event calendars are by no means a new idea on the social web: for example, I count Upcoming (now part of Yahoo!) among the first major web 2.0 applications. With its API-accessible events database and calendar, it is a prime example of an application that gets better the more people use it. Facebook, which launched only a few months after Upcoming, also provides a very solid social calendar experience. There are many others, and depending on how connected you are it's easy to find most of your event via activities or recommendations from your friends and colleagues.

That's why we are interested in expanding Mix in that direction. Things we'd like to offer:

• Who is attending this event?
• Who's interested?
• What related groups does this event belong to?
• What do people have to say about it?
• Which events are my friends and colleagues attending?
• People who like this event also like...
• etc.

We're still busy with a few other things but have been working on this new feature in the background. We don't have a definite launch date for you yet but hope to get a first iteration out the door rather sooner than later (shortly after OpenWorld '09 at the latest).

As part of our efforts to further open up Mix, all calendar information will be publicly viewable. Only if a user wants to interact (e.g. indicate interest, leave a comment etc.) will we require her to log in.

There's a lot of interesting things one can think of once the basics are in place.

How do you find the events that interest you? How do you decide if it's worth going? What can we do to make discovery and evaluation easier and more convenient? Let us know in the comments what's on your wishlist. Thanks!