The Oracle Mix Blog

With only a few hours of 2008 left (at least here on the West Coast), we wanted to get this out real quick and make sure we still get to launch our new blog in the old year.

Oracle Mix has been around for a little over a year now, during which time it has grown to over 30,000 members. In the run-up to Oracle OpenWorld 2008, we saw a number of new feature additions and a couple of interesting programs (Suggest a Session and Participate). Accordingly, there has been quite a bit of activity over the past year: hundreds of ideas have been shared, hundreds of questions asked and answered, and hundreds of groups have helped people connect around all kinds of (mainly Oracle-related) topics.

As Jake mentioned earlier, the AppsLab -- the team that launched Mix in 2007 -- recently passed on the baton, and now Marketing has full ownership of it (meaning we're in charge of all aspects of the site -- from maintenance, community management, new features etc. to integration and overall strategy).

Over the past few weeks, we've spent a good deal of time reviewing the many feature ideas and enhancement requests we've received in 2008 (plus the occasional bug report that we haven't gotten around to fixing yet). We're also talking to various business organizations inside Oracle that want to increase their engagement on Mix. Our roadmap for 2009 isn't quite finalized yet, but it's safe to say that there will be plenty of opportunities for us to make Oracle Mix better and more useful for our members.

We're very excited to help grow Mix further. This blog will be our main watering hole when it comes to floating ideas, discussing features and requirements or simply keeping everyone in the loop about what we're up to.

With that, have a Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2009!

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.

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.

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!