GlassFish Use of Sun's Social Media

(credentials - the initial author for this page has been involved directly in the GlassFish volume adoption strategy since 2005)

Below is a quick dump of some of ways that the [GlassFish] projects use Sun's social media. The list is not exhaustive but hopefully will give a reasonably accurate picture.

In a nutshell, the success of GlassFish would not have happened without these technologies. The key benefits from the technologies include:

• Direct outreach to the (non-paying) user and (paying) customers of our technologies
  • Getting our message directly in front of them, w/o the noise introduced by other mediators
• Reciprocal incoming communication from users and customers
  • What works, what is not working
  • How people are using our products
  • Looking for possible synergies from other projects as they show in elsewhere in the internet
• Direct reach to analysts, press, partners
• Fast spread of information within the corporation - we routinely use tools like
  • web search engines
  • RSS feed readers/aggregators
  • Code analysis/visualization tools
  • Adoption metrics
• Effectively crossing geographic boundaries creating consensus across distributed teams
  • Keeping the team together despite fast delivery cycles
• Very agile, self-publish, model where engineering, docs and marketing interact directly to get timely content to the users and customers.

We use at the least the following sites:

• Wikis.Sun.Com
• Blogs.Sun.Com
• SLX.sun.com
• mediacast.sun.com
• Specialized sites like the GlassFish wiki and the CTI
• New sites like Kenai.com and old like Java.Net (forums, aliases, wikis, etc)

We also use other non-Sun sites like slideshare.net, twitter, uStream.tv, etc.

Some of the specific ways we use these technologies include:

• Daily Newsletter TheAquarium
  • Weekly Online Webinar, GlassFish TV
  • Special purely online events like the GF Portfolio Launch
• Informal Adoption Stories
• List of GlassFish-related Releases
• Many direct-from-the-engineer blogs; those at Blogs.Sun.Com can be seen from http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/glassfish
• The usual mailing lists, forums, etc.

As indicated above; the GlassFish adoption model relies on this rich social web media at many layers and would not have succeeded without these sites.