Friday, February 01, 2008

Networking fatigue

Recently here's been a whole bunch of Web2.0 initiatives in the Oracle space.

Plus all the other sites like LinkedIn. And now Eddie Awad has create an Oracle Community site, a kind of Facebook it's okay to like.

I have signed up for Oracle Community but I'm really not sure whether I'll use it much. We've gone from almost nothing apart from OFF TOPIC threads in the forums to a plethora of sites in a few months. A man doesn't have to be Howard Rogers to feel that this is getting out of hand. There's a tremendous amount of overlap between all these sites and the purpose of each site isn't completely clear. Oracle Wiki seems to consist mainly of people redacting the documentation. Oracle Mix struck me as both over-engineered (lots of different things it could do) and under-engineered (impossible to find anything on the site); perhaps its purpose has become clearer now but I must admit the site navigation was so flawed I stopped visiting.

I will be interested to see whether Oracle Community keeps going after the initial spike of registrations and page customisation. There is an obvious need for some better form of communication between Oracle enthusiasts than adding comments to blog posts or forum threads but which doesn't require giving out personal contact details to all and sundry. Perhaps Oracle Community is the one.

Postscript


Just after I signed up I read this article on The Register about Facebook fatigue. It's worth a read.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

APC, the community votes with its feet. Some of these will stick, and some won't, but isn't it nice to have choices?

JK

Anonymous said...

I agree. This might seem odd, or even hypocritical, for someone who messes about with accounts on most of the above (and a couple more) as well as internal networking initiatives behind the Oracle corporate firewall.

However, yesterday I met up with an old friend (ironically enough through Twitter) and I enjoyed a good old fashioned conversation with him.

The conversation wasn't shared, rated or published. We didn't invite others to participate, include photos, publish an RSS feed stream the event live or require an Web 2.0 beta account.

The friendly chat used an ancient but still popular medium known as email.

Anonymous said...

More succinctly, 'fragmentation'.

Tim... said...

I'm in agreement to previous comments. Many of these things have an initial spike of interest, then fall by the wayside.

If all these things become yesterdays news it's no big thing. If one or two catch on and become useful it will be cool.

You sometimes have to cast out a few lines in an attempt to catch a single fish. :)

Cheers

Tim...