Cliff Notes: Social Computing for DBA's

If you look around, you will notice Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious and links to other social sites. So yah, it has made the Internet interesting to me again. It seems like developers adopt these technologies faster than DBA's. I guess DBA's are conservative by nature but sometimes change is good. The Microsoft forums(NNTP and HTTP) are nice and sometimes some meaningful conversation occurs but a lot of it is some dude asking the same easily googled question that someone else asked the day before. They do have their place and will be around for a long time but I am here to tell you there is more out there. I am going to give you a quick break down of the sites I use most often along with tips for the MSSQL DBA.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is probably the most widely accepted site by DBA's. There are two types of people on LinkedIn. The type that want to be connected to as many people as possible and the type that just wanted to be connected to the people they know in person. Both have pro's and con's. Two spots of interest for MSSQL DBA's are: SQL Server Professionals group and the Database Answers sections.

FaceBook:

Facebook is all the rage right now. Mark Z. is 23, single and worth 15 billion .com dollars. It must be nice. :) Chances are if you know someone, you know someone on Facebook. The downside, to me, is it seems like it is hard to interact and get to know *new* people. You could join the SQL Server 2008 group or the SQL Server 2005 group but traffic is light. The upside is the fact that they have allowed you import RSS feeds from other services so your friends can see your google reader shared items, flickr pics, YouTube fav's, Digg's etc. Add me as a friend.

Twitter:

This is a very popular micro-blogging service where you answer on question in 140 characters or less. You can check out Brent O's post on it as well. I will add that to get the most out of it, you have to subscribe to enough people. "Enough" is a relative term. You can read this post to get started. To keep an eye on SQL in the twitterverse, I use this search and subscribe to the RSS feed. I also use digsby as the client. This merges IM, twitter, and facebook into one client. Plurk get honorable mention as an up and coming twitter alternative.

FriendFeed:

This is a life streaming service from former google developers. It is simple yet extremely useful. Sign up and then import all of your services like flickr, google talk status and shared items, twitter, YouTube, and other RSS\JSON based feeds. See my page as an example. However, the flip side is what makes this service so useful. Once you subscribe to a 100+ people with similar interests, you have focused stream of new info. There is "noise" but you can also filter. I filter out all twitter messages that are not "liked" or commented on. See this post when your signal to noise ratio gets out of whack.

I am not going to talk about DIGG, del.icio.us, LiveJournal, MySpace. If you are not using those sites already, it is probably because you don't want to. Maybe it is just me but I am beginning to phase out those sites. I spent most of my browser time in google reader and FriendFeed these days.

The million dollar question: What is the next big thing? If you can answer that, you'll have VC's throwing money at you.

Let me know if I am sleeping on anything useful.

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COMMENTS:

Yep, agree with everything there.

I'm liking BrightKite.com, which is like location-based social networking. When you go somewhere, you check in on BrightKite, and others can see where you've been and who else has been to a particular place. That way, you can meet people who go to the same coffeeshops, bookstores, etc. Plus, you can have surprise chance encounters when someone else shows up near you - it promotes sudden meetups.

Granted, this is more useful for those of us who telecommute or work at client sites, not typical DBAs who work onsite during the week, but it's definitely the next big thing - especially with phones being GPS-enabled these days. I can envision the new iPhone being able to check in even easier than BrightKite's current SMS-based and web-based checkins.

If any DBAs out there want a BrightKite.com invite, ping me, but promise me that you're actually going to use it, since they don't give out too many invites.

posted @ Monday, June 09, 2008 8:38 AM by Brent Ozar

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i use all 4

LinkedIn is pretty good, but I think it's playing catch up in a lot of areas. Especially groups, which don't really have a function. I have an open networker as one of my contacts and it's not really worth the trouble. Should have stayed out of the open networking group.

Facebook is good, but it's catching up on the professional networking side. SQL Server 2008 might not have a lot of traffic, but the Iron Maiden and Battlestar Galactica pages always have postings.


Twitter and Friendfeed are pretty good

University of Phoenix just started a new alumni page that is a mix of Facebook and LinkedIn and they got a lot of things right. You can create groups and there is a discussion area for each group for members to post things.

posted @ Monday, June 09, 2008 9:35 AM by Alen

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What if you also can make money for know the correct people and be part of a social networking site..., you ask for something new?, well stay tunned because in weeks you can see the social networking with new eyes, just visit www.cachinko.com

posted @ Wednesday, July 02, 2008 2:43 PM by Armando G.

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Comments from the following blog entry: http://209.251.180.21/site/archive/2008/12/social-computing-for-the-dba-slides-and-source/

posted @ Sunday, June 07, 2009 2:09 PM

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