I don’t cover the enterprise space, but my colleague Ray Wang says that the Sun acquisition will be successful for Oracle, check out his blog post to read his highlights.  

While I’ll leave the specifics of the product and company integration to him, I want to focus on the cultures, and how it impacts their social programs.  Anyone reading this blog knows this is important as it’s essentially how they’ll communicate with customers and employees.

Sun has a long history of being open, through their technology, executives that blog, and the thousands of employees that participate in one way or another in the social web.  On the other hand, Oracle, which I observe to have a culture of top down management has been slower to embrace the social web.  To their credit, in the last few years, they’ve hosted a Lunch 2.0, launched an innovation piece, a social network called Mix, and have a thriving community in OTN.  It goes beyond just technology though, true transparency from Sun is rare, and difficult for many companies to achieve.

What happens next is what’s interesting.  Will Oracle adopt some of the open Sun culture, will Larry start to participate in the direct conversations with the market? Will the Sun culture simply be wrapped under the red banners? Or will it end up like Peoplesoft, those that integrate well shuffle in line.  

In reality, we’ll see a little bit of both.  Because of Sun’s strong hardware focus (where Oracle doesn’t yet play), those existing customers have come to expect that same type of open discussion to occur.  Where we may see a bit of lean towards Oracle culture, is likely where the software products are.  

Key takeaways

• We know that culture is the biggest driver or detractor when it comes to companies adopting social technologies.
• How companies deploy social programs is often a direct mirror of how the company is managed from the top down.
• As mergers occur, expect the social programs to morph, expect some of Sun’s openness to reduce, and some of Oracle’s culture to continue to open up.

There’s a lot of forces that factor into what I do online, from my day job, expectations from the market, personal relationships and client relationships. In fact, I have some specific rules about how I blog, and even how I tweet. This last glorious weekend of sun and surf, I gave up just talking about web strategy, and extended the discussion to my personal life.

What’s interesting is that people react differently to me when I share my personal life (I am an individual, despite that I’ve dedicated most of my life to my career and family). I like Rex’s take, who had enough, and was thoughtful enough to say he didn’t want to hear about my personal life on Twitter. What’s important to me, may not be important to him, and I get that.

There’s a couple of potential solutions:

1) Do what I want, and tweet about what’s important to me during work, and what’s important to me after work. Battlestar Galactica and @goodboyrumba and all.
2) Just make my Twitter account for business and create a separate one for personal (more and more of my family is joining Twitter)
3) Wait for Twitter to offer permission based tweets around our different facets of our persona (work vs personal vs public).

It’s quite the conundrum. When I asked folks on Twitter, how much personal should I share, it was pretty even split. Some want to know more about the man behind web strategy, some just want all web strategy signal. On the other hand, we teach companies to show a bit of their human side to the market –but no one cares about what you ate for lunch.

I’m going to throw this one back to you, the readers, and do be honest. How much of my personal life do you care to hear from folks you’ve come to rely on for business information? Perhaps the bigger question is, how much of our personal lives should we share with our work? Is there a difference?

Update: Rex has a new blog post, All work makes Jack a dull boy, he’s read many of the comments on my post and his, for the most part we’re in agreement: mixture is needed, but better tools could help those filter content.

There’s a business opportunity for whoever wants to innovate. Since I don’t build products myself, I’ll just tell you what I’m looking for as I see a market need. If you build it, kindly leave a comment below, and I’ll amend the post. I have a feeling that it will emerge in a few days, or an existing company will add these features.

Pain point
Finding people on Twitter, then following them is already a challenge. Sharing your hard earned list takes time. I deal with a lot of executives at companies, that want to quickly scan the topics in their industry, or see what their employees, customers, and competitors are doing. Searching by keyword isn’t sufficient. Carter Lusher has this large Twitter list of analysts, but in order to see their streams, adding each one is a manual process.

Who’s it for?
People that don’t have time to fiddle with finding people on twitter, then sharing with others. It’s quite possible this could be for people who want to spectate Twitter, but may not want to participate. This could end up being a tickertape in some executives office. (Update: Best Buy has done something similar)

Potential Use Case
Here’s some potential uses: I want to track all analysts in my industry, then I could my executives a single URL so they can observe. Or, give a sales rep a single webpage to see all the tweets coming out of their client. Or allow a professional to quickly track all their industry counterparts tweets. I don’t want to have to manually manage the list (adding and removing members myself) so the crowd should be able to submit, but a smaller group of admins could verify and allow it to happen.

What it should do:

Allow anyone to create a public stream of Twitter users, later it could evolve to include blogs and articles. For example, if I wanted to create a feed of just Web Designers, or VCs, or my colleagues. Recently, Alltop created the ability to create a customized lens, that’s the right direction, but just do this for tweets. It should all be in a single stream, so it’s easier to track the zeitgeist.

It should allow members to submit themselves to these lists, or allow anyone to volunteer others. Although I’m familiar with Kevin Rose’s WeFollow, it requires users to self-submit, bloglines requires a single individual to manage the list –that’s not scalable.. Tweetburn is the Twitter version of Alltop, but doesn’t have customized list ability (they say it’s coming) I’d rather make it social so the community (or admins) can manage. Fernando just created this public friendfeed example, but it doesn’t allow these features.

Have administrative controls. In order to keep the lists free of spammers or wannabees in categories, there should be permissions that still allow for the crowd to submit names, but a moderator(s) to manage.

It should be public. I’m well versed with Friendfeed, but I don’t see any features that allow me to share my “colleague” feed with the world.

Be easy to use. Especially for busy professionals who just want to monitor. Yahoo pipes is too geeky, Friendfeed is for edgelings, and Twitter search doesn’t have the above features.

Have further features that allow very large feeds to segment by a variety of filters perhaps by location, popularity, and other metadata. This is a nice to have.

Aggregate then prioritize. Feeds on their own are a bit messy, if you’re not in front of in real-time you may miss something. This feature should bubble up the most important tweets based on popularity or weight. Techmeme, Tagclouds, Friendfeed’s ‘best of day’ all have some of these features. This is a nice to have, but should be on the roadmap.

Thanks for this, I see a business need for this (btw, go read my posts on social crm, or think about the data analysis, or fall back on advertising), as I speak to many companies and executives that are trying to get a sense of what’s happening in Twitter, but don’t have time to jump in. Help them to survey the seascape and you could create a business out of this.

Also, take a step back. This is interesting, I started this call for product request on Twitter, didn’t see it, then am blogging it. It’s an example of how products in the future could be built, now imagine if there was a formal system.

Leave a comment if you’ve feature ideas for this, or you’ve seen something that does it.