Oracle launches their own social network | Hacker News Reader

Oracle launches their own social network

mix.oracle.com

14 pointscleverjake16 comments

This isn't unusual, a number of larger companies have created internal social network clones. Big companies seem to have a bunch of little pet projects that get started because somebody important is trying to look good and be noticed. A lot of projects. Large companies spend a massive amount of wasted effort on very poor internal software projects. It is sad.

any good examples?

Several, unfortunately. I'd rather not talk about my personal experiences here, though.

Here's some social networking examples:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/322857/The_new_employ...

A lot of these projects are hardly used and hated by employees. Typical tactics involve making it mandatory for all employees to upload a picture and start a profile so they can boast huge adoption numbers.

"Launches"? Heh. I'm actually the lead dev on this (entp). It's been around since at least 2007, when my git history starts. Nothing new about it, but it seems to be a good way for Oracle employees and customers to communicate about products.

This is not new, been around for 3-4 years now, and is targeted for oracle employees.

What Oracle launched on Wednesday is this:

http://cloud.oracle.com//my-cloud/service_social.html

This is a Social Network layer on top of their latest Fusion Applications. In my opinion, this is more about enterprise collaboration and less about "social". Oracle is just being buzzword compliant here.

Why am I secretly wishing that users have to specify their profiles using BPEL?

Lord.

This is classic management by objectives incentivizing with checklist implementation. "Social is big, we'll be social!"

People say that big companies are aircraft carriers: to big to be nimble, too big to stop. It doesn't have to be that way, but things like this do little to assuage from the notion that it's endemic.

Isn't this incredibly old? I swear this has been on ENTP's portfolio page for at least 2 years now... http://entp.com/work/

I was working on an australian focused social network for oracle a while back (almost three years now) and this was an example site given for what they had done overseas, at that point it was also a rails app, and I note in the portfolio it's a rails app too. Higher up in the comments here I can see someone referring to this as an overused enterprise framework, so maybe it's been relaunched using one of oracle's tools? Couldn't be bothered to fiddle with it and figure it out.

It looks pretty much the same to me from memory.

This is what happens when enterprisey frameworks are overused. Every link on the front page wants to log me in using js to submit a hidden form containing thousands of bytes of base64 crap to express what they know about me, namely nothing. The unenhanced <noscript> version is generic and completely useless, of course.

That's actually the Oracle single sign-on server you're seeing there, not the Mix app itself.

Clicking on a couple of posts, or going to the verification link in my sign up email, I get:

  "System error. Please re-try your action. If you continue to get this error, please contact the Administrator."

Edit: it looks like it doesn't like Opera.

wonderfully buzzword filled description video -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d...

"Oracle" and "easy to use" just don't match. Sorry, but unless Oracle acquire such a tool (and doesn't have time to make it crappy), I don't think they can have something user-friendly, useful and working.

They aren't allowed to try?

By all means, they are allowed to try. I just don't think they can do it. If they do - good for the customers.

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