The Oracle Mix Blog

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.

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!

This is almost not worth mentioning, but for the sake of completeness, here are the changes that went out with our release on Friday:

• Added a link to the FAQ to our feedback form.
• Made one of the RSS icons larger (will do the same across the entire site eventually in an effort to make RSS much more obvious).
• Added a tweak to the last login timestamp.

More than anything, this was yet another test run to allow our development team to acquaint themselves with the deployment infrastructure. Everything worked as expected, so it's not entirely unlikely that this week we shall see the first meaningful upgrade to Mix.

We pushed out a fix last Thursday that addressed an issue a number of our users were having with group invitations giving a server error.

The fix seems to have worked.

Please leave a comment or contact us if you're still experiencing any problems: https://mix.oracle.com/feedback/new (requires login)

Ok,

So after what seems like ages, we're happy to announce that we've just released the first round of enhancements to Oracle Mix that are actually visible to you, our esteemed Mix members.

As I had mentioned previously, over the past couple of months a lot of work has been required on the Mix backend as we further familiarize ourselves with the application and also try to get things fully operational after the hardware upgrade back in December. All very necessary and important stuff, but nothing really that our users should have to care much about.

Today's release is about making Mix more useful.

Without much further ado, here's the list of changes. As always, please let us know (in the comments below of via our feedback form) if you spot any aberrant behavior, and tell us what you like or don't like (and how we can make it better). Thank you!

1. Tabs for groups

Up until now, the groups page contained four lists that were spread across different sections of the page:

• My groups
• Most popular groups
• Groups matching your interests
• New groups since last month

Navigating those lists could be a bit cumbersome at times, so we decided to turn them into tabs. Each tab shows ten items per page and comes with our standard navigation bar at the bottom which should make browsing them a lot more convenient.

2. Hot groups

We added a new tab that shows "hot" groups. For now, "hotness" is based simply on the number of people who have recently joined the group as new members. Over time, we will take into account content creation events as well. So even if the member count in your group is pretty steady but your members are posting and commenting a lot, that would also increase the "hotness" factor for this group (and might land you a spot at the top of the list).

The feature is intended to make it easier for both new and existing users to discover interesting groups, and activity is one of many filters people like to apply. On the community management end of things, it will also allow us to identify less active groups to see if they need any help getting things off the ground.

We know leader boards can sometimes have unintended side effects (e.g. favor those who are already very popular) so we'll keep a close eye on how this develops and will make changes if need be.

3. Improved group activity log

Up until now, the "group activity log" showed all activities from all group member no matter where on Mix these activities had occurred. In an effort to make this stream a lot more relevant, we've changed this so as to show only those activities that relate directly to the group (i.e. new group members, new posts or new comments).

We've also added this stream as the new default tab for groups. So now when you go to a group page the first thing you'll see is what's been going on in that group lately.

4 Improved group recommendations

We tinkered with this a little bit but will probably have to do more fine-tuning over the coming months. This feature was always intended to give users a list of groups that they might find interesting based on the self-assigned tags and products in their user profile.

Up until now, it just looked for groups with the same tags or products as the user's and then ordered it by creation date of the group.

Again, we wanted to increase relevancy.

First, we have added a weighting mechanism. For the time being, a matching tag or product will be worth 10 points, a group member who is also in your personal network will be worth 3 points.

Second, we have reduced this list to show only ten items. These ten groups displayed are the ones that have the highest combined score and should be most relevant.

Once you choose to join any of the recommended groups, that recommendation will be removed from the list. New recommendations are generated once every 24 hours.

5. Group activity digest

This is a new feature that allows you to receive a daily activity digest for one or more of your groups. The digest will be sent via email and will include news from all groups for which notifications have been turned on.

A common complaint we've heard is that Mix makes it way too hard for users to follow the conversations and activities that are happening both in their groups as well as on the site in general. This new feature is a first of several steps to make it easier to stay in the loop.

We're expecting that this will have a positive impact on active user levels as well as the number of comments people leave on Mix.

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Hope you find these useful. Have a nice weekend, everybody!

A quick note on yesterday's failed deployment:

We ran into a few issues during the deployment process. Mix went down, and we had to revert back to the previous release.

When we brought the site back up after about 45 minutes total down time, we then discovered that somewhere along the way we had lost the folder containing our profile images (for both people and groups).

We were quickly able to restore the images from our backup. However, about half a dozen profile images had been lost permanently. Apologies for that. We have notified the affected Mix members.

We are looking into ways to prevent this from happening in the future.

Things should be back to normal now. Please let us know if you still spot any errors or abnormal behavior on Mix. Thanks!

We pushed live the latest release to Mix on Tuesday afternoon.

Here's what's included:

Youtube video embedding for ideas

We've begun to roll out content embedding on Mix. For starters, you can now include a Youtube video in your ideas (see example).

Over the coming weeks, we'll add this feature to questions and group blog posts and will also support additional content types (e.g. Slideshare presentations).

This was one of the more popular requests we've received from our Mix members. We hope you like it and look forward to seeing what you'll do with this new feature.

Mark comments as helpful

We've added a simple flagging mechanism that allows users to mark each others' comments as helpful. For now, you'll simply see a green bar appear next to comments that have been marked helpful.

Over the coming weeks, we'll probably also do something with that information (e.g. expose the most recent helpful comments).

Public groups

Up until now, everything on Mix except the homepage required logging into Mix with your Oracle SSO. We realized that that's a bit restrictive especially when you want to point people to Mix who haven't signed up yet. For example, on the Oracle OpenWorld '09 homepage, we've started to link to our various satellite sites on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and also Mix. When visitors tried to access the link to the Oracle OpenWorld group on Mix they were greeted with the rather unfriendly login mask.

We've added the option for group owners to manage their groups' privacy settings more granularly. The three privacy levels are:

• Private and closed
• Viewable to Oracle Mix members
• Publicly viewable

Again, let us know what you think. We'll share how many groups are making use of this new feature in our weekly metrics update.

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Finally, a few minor fixes were included regarding the RSS feed for group activity as well as a few things on the backend.

Last week, after a couple of tries, we released a new feature that allows users to embed Slideshare presentations in their ideas, questions or group blog posts (log into Mix to see this example).

We also expanded the existing feature of Youtube video embedding to work for questions and group blog posts as well.

Next, we're looking at Screentoaster to see how we can get screencasts embedded.

As always, let us know how you like it.

The next release should go out later this week.