Musings on Oracle/Sun re: social networking

Some quick thoughts:

• Sun has an internal "Corporate Facebook" platform called "SunSpace".
  • This could help bootstrap an Oracle effort to deliver a dedicated social network site (ala Lotus Connections) to compliment WebCenter (which is more of a portal-centric play for social networking).
  • SunSpace could conceptually "surround" Beehive.
  • However, Oracle has not indicated that it believes in the concept of a destination site for social networking.
• An interested component of SunSpace is called "community equity".
  • The underlying algorithms could augment the capabilities Oracle acquired from Tacit and BEA (Pathways) to analyze a variety of network relationships across people, artifacts, activities, etc.
• There is some internal work going on to pilot an enterprise social messaging systems (called !sweet).
  • Complimentary to OraTweet.
  • Social messaging would be a valuable addition to Beehive.
• There has also been a lot of interesting work regarding FOAF and SSL at Sun.
• Sun had been involved in Project SocialSite, which is based on OpenSocial and Apache Shindig. It appears that the project will move under Apache.
  • Oracle would clearly benefit by leveraging a distributed model for enabling other web systems with social widgets.

Comments

[Peter Reiser]

Thanks for posting !

Sounds great - I am excited :-)

[Ceri Davies]

SunSpace is based on Atlassian's Confluence; are you suggesting Oracle will be after them next? ;-)

[mike gotta]

Ceri, True, it is based on Confluence, but I don't think the integration is so hard-wired that other wikis could be supported - and Oracle has a few already :)

[Marius Ciortea]

Hi,
Let me start by saying that I'm an Oracle employee :)
I wanted to point out that internally we have a Social Network site called "Connect". It is very popular at Oracle. This site is being managed by the AppsLab Group http://theappslab.com/.
For external users we have http://mix.oracle.com, this site is managed by Oracle Marketing and I happen to lead that effort. You can get more info at http://blogs.oracle.com/mix/ or http://twitter.com/oraclemix.

Cheers,
Marius
http://twitter.com/radu43
Cheers,
Marius

[JB]

I wonder how central any of this is to the big issues Oracle/Sun will focus on first -- mysql, hardware (disposition?), and layoffs. Hard for me to see them settling quickly enough to make progress in this category any time soon.

[mike gotta]

JB, clearly there are larger issues swirling around this acquisition - but that's not my beat - the thoughts here are some "nuggets of gold" within Sun that might not be noticed during an acquisition that is large and complex. Oracle would do well to look closely at different areas within Sun. There are a lot of smart people there doing interesting things (in this case, related to social networking) that are not well-known...