The Oracle Mix Blog

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.

One of the things a lot of people have asked for on Oracle Mix is the ability to somehow share and discuss content (e.g. videos, presentations, documents etc.).

While we won't be able to add file upload anytime soon, we're looking into enabling content embedding.

This morning, we had a first conference call with our colleagues from Legal, whose job it is to make sure that everything we do on Mix complies with Oracle policy and regulations. To be sure, there's a lot of things that need to be considered before allowing this kind of web 2.0 collaboration. To name a few:

• Security: risks of embedding malicious code
• Content: risks of copyright or SEC violations
• Brand: risks of being associated with unofficial or non-Oracle content

As we're preparing some mockups of what this new feature could look like, here's what's on our list so far in terms of services we'd like to support:

• Video: Youtube
• Presentations: Slideshare
• Images: Flickr
• PDFs and other documents: to be determined

Which content types would you like to embed on Oracle Mix? Let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Sharing. It's a core piece of the social web. People share pictures, videos, documents, bookmarks (heck, even words). Social networks like Facebook are built around content sharing among peers.

A bunch of feature ideas on our extended list (the things we've been too busy to get to so far) deal with making your Mix content more shareable.

As a little experiment, we added the AddThis widget to our Vote-a-Session program (which, by the way, has been extended by one week).

Here's how people have used it so far:

Not too much uptake yet, though it did pop up in our Twitter monitoring a few times. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn seem to be the most popular sharing services.

Anyway, do you think this would be helpful if we added it to the general Mix site? Are there any specific services you'd prefer us to try?

Let us know in the comments.

The Video team has been busy working on a new Oracle video player. They've asked us to embed it on our blog for testing purposes.

Check it out:

Please have a look and let us -- and them -- know how it's working for you (make sure to leave your OS and browser information in the comments). Thanks!

Update (2.23pm): As per Andrea's comment below, this is only a beta player that the Digital Media team is using as a "proof of concept" for functional testing within their environment. Just to keep in mind when you find things that aren't quite perfect yet. Thanks!

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!

Today, we'd like to invite you to try out a new feature on Mix we've been working on over the past couple of months. It's an idea we've been wanting to implement for quite some time but didn't have the resources to do so.

The social session builder combines schedule information from events (in this case, Oracle OpenWorld 2009) with the social network on Mix. It allows you to easily build your own personal schedule but also to see who in your network is attending the same sessions.

We weren't able to put this feature on our roadmap for Mix this year. Instead, we worked with a third party to mock up the experience so that we can at least gather valuable feedback for next year. If it turns out that this is functionality is something that Mix members want to see we will try to secure the resources and funding to make it happen.

Please note that while the third-party application is very solid, we're still working out some kinks on the SSO integration piece. One requirement (for us as well as the security review team) was for this to rely on Oracle SSO. That means Mix users can use the third-party application without additional signup or login steps. We finally got it figured out; however, due to the history of how Mix was set up and how we handle our own Mix profiles, there's a slight chance that some users won't have access to the social schedule builder application. If you're one of the unfortunate ones, please contact us and we'll try to find a work-around.

Please log into Mix and you'll find a new header navigation item "OpenWorld Schedule (alpha)" which will take you directly to the schedule builder app.

Here's what we'd like you to do:

• Give it a try!
• Let us know any problems
• Let us know if you find the new feature useful
• Tell your friends

It's important to note that as a prototype, this application is not integrated with our official schedule builder application yet. While we pull in all the publicly available schedule information from there, it won't reflect any updates you make on our app. So for any sessions or events that require "first come, first serve" registration, please make sure to also go to the official schedule builder (though we assume that at this point most people will already have done so).

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Chris and Mike at The Social Collective and to the people on our SSO team who steered us through this integration. It took quite a bit of effort to get this piece up and running, and we hope you all like it.

Mike has posted his thoughts here: Procrastinators Rejoice: OpenWorld's Social Schedule Builder is Live!

And with that: enjoy, and have a fun Oracle OpenWorld 2009!

As you all know, we launched an alpha version of the social schedule builder for Oracle Openworld 2009 a couple of days before the event kicked off.

The basic premise was the idea that we could add value by combining the publicly available schedule information with the social graph on Oracle Mix. By allowing Mix members to share which of the many hundreds of sessions they find interesting or plan to attend they might help their friends and colleagues make better scheduling decisions (and hence have a better experience at OpenWorld).

Due to the challenges we encountered during the integration with Oracle Mix and the time it took to push this live, not all of the cool features we had available (e.g. mobile interface and others) were activated, and some of our Mix members had trouble accessing the application at all.

We've already talked to some of you who got a chance to try out this new feature in person but wanted to take the opportunity to ask all of our alpha testers to leave a comment here on our blog to tell us what you thought.

• How did it work?
• Did you find it useful?
• Would you like to see something like this next year?
• What other ideas to you have that could improve the scheduling experience?

Thanks to everyone who spent the time giving this feature a shot despite the fact we were only to release it last minute. We appreciate your effort very much and would like to reward you with an even better release at one of our upoming events (e.g. OpenWorld 2010).