Chatter - Episode #31 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 31st episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the second week of February 2011. This episode is titled, Chatter. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing experts. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me, who looks surprised that I was able to do Chatter as well as I did, is Justin Edelstein. Justin, how you doing? Are you Will.i.am? I am Will.i.am. So cool. You look like Will.i.am. I resemble him in absolutely no way, except for I do have that funny hat that he had on in the commercial that kind of was... I've seen you wear that hat. Yeah it's sort of... With the goggles. It's like see-through. Yeah. It's like a see-through head forming thing.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah it was like something from like Terminator. It was awesome. So talk about

Jason Atwood: our agenda. We have some news, some Google news, some Google art news and some Google weddings. Google's getting married. Talk about that. Talk about some Facebook news, Facebook mistakes I guess as it were. interesting that comes out. And then of course we'll wrap up with the Talk with Chatter, all the chatter news of the week, lots of it out there. And we'll finish up with our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. But let's get started with first what happened with Google. Two little pieces and why don't you lead us off by

Justin Edelstein: telling us about one of them. Sure. So Google launched a couple of interesting, I don't want to call them side projects, because almost everything Google does is like a side project. It's beta, it's labs. Yeah it's labs, it's beta, it's this, it's that. I mean their main product is search and advertising and everything else is sort of a side project, right? Like Google Wave. Kind of like Google Wave. So Google launched a product called Google Art Project, can be found at GoogleArtProject.com where they essentially took what they do for Street View, if you're familiar with with Google Maps, Street View is sort of when you can drop that little yellow guy onto a street and then see pictures of the street that you're actually looking at on the map. They walked through museums around the world and sort of did Street View. Oh that's awesome. So you can you know go through all these museums all over the world right the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Met here New York City or MoMA, click on one of the museums and then sort of walk through the museum through the eyes of a street view. So you go from painting to painting or section to section, you can zoom in, you can refocus yourself to sort of be looking straight at a piece of art or you know move yourself around see around corners etc it's just like Google Street View but within all of these major art museums across the world I thought it was just another interesting move by Google to put more and more data into their realm of what they know about.

03:21 Jason Atwood: Yeah, they, you know, one of their missions, their big mission is, I think it's catalog all the data of the world.

Justin Edelstein: Organize the world's data or something like that.

Jason Atwood: That does make us a little bit of a chink when, what, space? They're working on it.

Justin Edelstein: Don't they have like Google Moon or Google World or Earth or something?

Jason Atwood: Organizing all content. All data, everywhere. In your brain. So it's interesting that they, I think it's great, because even stuff, I mean maps, when I first heard about maps, I was like, why would I want to use, I use maps and Streetview more often than not to like, anywhere I'm going, I'm like, oh, even if this is down the block, I'm like, oh, let's see how long it'll take me to walk there, and let's see a picture of it on my iPhone. I use it constantly. This is a great, it's a great idea, and I can see sitting with my kid and saying, hey, let's go look at some pictures in another museum.

Justin Edelstein: A museum that's not around the corner or down the block or whatever. It's across the globe.

Jason Atwood: We just happen to live in New York City, where there happen to be a lot of museums that I don't go to. But I can not go to museums across the world as well. So that would be interesting.

Justin Edelstein: And to tack on to your maps point, yesterday I was going to a client meeting at their office, and I had to drive there because it was out on Long Island. and I thought to myself, how on earth would I have gotten here 10 years ago? Like I walked out, all I had was their address, not even on me, in my Salesforce org. I go into Salesforce mobile, I hit their address, it pops me right into a map on my iPhone, and I say directions to here from current location, go. I'm like, wow, how would I have done that 10 years ago? Like, amazing.

Jason Atwood: I remember I used to keep a note. I kept notes. I kept them now in Evernote. But back in the day, I kept them in the trio notes and palm notes. And I used to keep a note about how to get to my apartment. And it included like, buy a subway, buy, buy, if you're coming over the George Washington Bridge, if you're coming over the mid-side.

Justin Edelstein: So you could send it to people. Right.

Jason Atwood: And I would literally keep it so I could email it to people very quickly. Nowadays, I can't imagine saying to anybody how to get anywhere just to show up.

Justin Edelstein: Here's my address. Here's my address. People are like, let me send you directions. I'm like, I don't want them.

Jason Atwood: Give me your address. Right. Unless you know that Google Maps is wrong.

Justin Edelstein: Or unless there's no street signs and I have to make a left at a tree. Like that. That's it.

Jason Atwood: Even then, I want Google to tell me that. So yet another Google, if two more pieces of Google News, one I just threw in there to. Thank you. That's actually pretty interesting news.

Justin Edelstein: I just threw it on the Wave in real time and I just saw it. That's true. How about that?

Jason Atwood: So the second one is Google Weddings. Why don't you talk a little bit about Google Weddings. It sounds like an interesting mashup of things.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so Google, again, another sort of side project of theirs, they took some of their, this one's taking some of their existing technologies and packaging them together as a product. So Google has launched Google Weddings, which is essentially the ability to simplify wedding planning, and you can use Google Sites to create a website for your wedding, which people do, right, and have been doing. You can use Google Docs with pre-templates to do your budget, to do your invite list, to do whatever else you might need to do, scheduling, seating charts, whatever you need to do need to do for weddings. I don't know. I'm not married. I don't know. I don't know, at least.

07:05 Jason Atwood: Yes, you do have to do all of that. All that stuff. Really, you have to keep track of all the presents you're getting and who gets the deal.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, all that stuff you could do within Google Weddings. And then Picasso web albums to store photos and stuff. And you can make them public or private to publish them out to the website. It's a package that they put together of existing products and sort of branded it as Google Weddings.

Jason Atwood: So I have here on this table, I have a hammer. pack of nails and some wood. And I'm calling it Google Home. Go ahead, build your home. Because here it is. You got your Google. I think it's funny. I mean, unless there's anything else in it that's actually helping, it's just like saying, OK, instead of using iPhoto, use Google Picasa. Instead of using Excel, use Google Apps. Instead of using any other web service on the planet that can build a free website within seconds, use Google Sites.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, well, it's all together in one place. And for those that aren't as technically inclined as As us, you might want a one-stop shop to go log into a place and be able to put everything together in one organized flow.

Jason Atwood: I can't wait to see if you use it when you get married.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not getting married, so I'll never use this product.

Jason Atwood: Speaking of not getting married, the biggest news this week, actually, was that Google released two-factor authentication. Multi-factor. Yeah, which is? Multiples. More than one. which is great. One factor is basically your password. So when you saw, people think, oh, two factor means it's my username and password. No, that's one factor. It's who you are and then your key. Two factor then brings a third, another factor to it. So it's who you are, one factor of authentication, and then another. And I can tell you, back in the days we worked at that big brokerage, we spent six months to a year talking about two-factor authentication and how to do it.

Justin Edelstein: many zeros in a budget. So Google has launched it.

Jason Atwood: This is actually great news for Google app users and for the enterprise market, because it's now saying, we can do this. We can turn on two-factor authentication for your enterprise. One of the blog posts I thought were funny, they were saying, do this. Don't think about it.

Justin Edelstein: Do it immediately.

Jason Atwood: Basically, you would put in some other way to contact you, like a phone or some other way. And then when you're authenticating, it would send some other digit to that. So it's basically saying, you have your username and password, but then when you need to log in, it'll text you six other digits, six other numbers that you then put in. Therefore, meaning that not only do you have to know the username and password, but you have to know the username and password, and then have the phone with you at any time. So text messaging actually has made this much easier. Again, back in the day, you used to hold these little keys, these little random number generating keys, which were a pain. Now basically everybody has a cell phone and SMS. So I noticed this when I log into banks now, sometimes I do this. Sometimes their Bank of America one uses what's called a site key, where they'll actually show you a picture.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, a lot of banks do the picture.

10:06 Jason Atwood: Yeah, so you represent the picture, yeah.

Justin Edelstein: Because I'll sometimes put in my wrong, like I notice a lot of banks now is the username and the password fields are not even on the same screen. Like they'll say, put in your username, you hit log in, it then flips you to another screen where you put in your password, which has your picture. And I have so many accounts at so many different places and use different logins. And sometimes I'll just put the wrong login, and I'll go login, and I'll land on the password screen, and I won't see my picture. And my passphrase, I'll be like, oh, this is not even my username. This is not the place I should be. I know this is not where I am. Whatever I put in here is not going to work.

Jason Atwood: I think it's

Justin Edelstein: They also mention, just to tack on, you mentioned the methodology by which you'll be generating these codes, SMS, but they're tying it into their mobile OSs. So it seems like they're going to have apps for Androids, Blackberries, and iPhones to generate random codes for you as well. Oh, nice. That's good.

Jason Atwood: Again, something you should consider at all times. I know Salesforce has built in a lot of, they've gone the other route, which is sort of that we're not going to do two-factor authentication. What we are going to do is do security authentication, which means the first time you use a browser, you'll get that notice that says you have to authorize this. And then they send you another link, and you have to use that. They also use the security token, which you're going to do the API stuff. I know that it'd be interesting to see if this pushes the needle a little bit further to make Salesforce say that they should be using two-factor. Again, there's reasons. You can lock Salesforce down by IP ranges. She can make it pretty secure, but with all that security comes a problem. We'll definitely try it. We'll try it in our Google Apps, which we use for all of our stuff, and see.

Justin Edelstein: Now, is it going to be a pain in the butt?

Jason Atwood: Well, we'll turn it on and see.

Justin Edelstein: Is it going to make me multi-factor every time, or is it going to have some sort of built-in thing where it says, OK, I recognize, Justin, that's your computer, and you log in from that place where you are all the time using that computer so we know it's you. Right.

Jason Atwood: So as it says in the blog post on Google, it says. I'm not reading the blog post. It says remember your verification for this computer after 30 days. Good. I like that.

Justin Edelstein: Don't be a pain in the butt.

Jason Atwood: Don't make me do it every time. But make sure that if someone's randomly doing it from someplace else. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: Like if someone's trying to log into my Gmail from London, make them authenticate again.

Jason Atwood: I will say one of the best stories I have about two-factor authentication, or security authentication, came back in 2003. So this is way before this sort of stuff started to get big. Like, in fact, before most of these people did anything other than username and passwords. And I was on my honeymoon in Malta, which is the island off of Italy. And I was logging in, because I'm a geek, I was logging into PayPal or something. And it literally stopped me and then sent me an email and it looks like you're trying to log in to PayPal from this country, country code Malta, whatever, and send an email saying, is this okay, is this right? Because it looks like it's a really big breach. And it was the first time I've ever seen, again, this is 2003, someone, a computer program or a website kind of start to recognize where I had come from and basically say, this looks like a place that you shouldn't be coming from, why are you coming from here? It was a fun experience, but anyway, yeah.

13:46 Jason Atwood: So Malta in 2003, PayPal had it. And PayPal has lots of problems with people cracking into there, so pair accounts. All right, moving on. Moving right along. So Facebook. This is really not really a big cloud story, but I think something we should highlight just because it kind of proves what we're doing is good.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it does. So the Facebook CTO, Brett Taylor, was asked, what was one of your biggest mistakes? and he answered buying servers, which is an interesting answer. So Brett Taylor came from FriendFeed, and he was sort of the chief executive of FriendFeed, which was subsequently purchased by Facebook later on down the road. And at the time, in the early days of building up FriendFeed, they were faced with the decision, do we buy servers or should we use cloud services like Amazon to scale and they decided to buy servers. At the time apparently it was, they had costed out or done some cost analysis and it was cheaper to buy the servers at that time, maybe not thinking long term. But then he said it was sort of a huge mistake because it didn't really factor in the time and love and care it takes to maintain said server once you've purchased it. And he sort of said, oh, that was a big mistake. I had to wake up in the middle of the night, go to data centers, try and fix things. Wish I didn't have to do that. STEVE HUFFMANN.

Jason Atwood: Servers are no fun. It's interesting that they're admitting it. I mean, again, it's always pointing to the cloud strategy, but admitting that owning your own servers is not a good idea. I actually don't know about Facebook's architecture. I would assume that they had their own data centers.

Justin Edelstein: According to the movie, one of their first purchases was an Apache server.

Jason Atwood: Rented. They rented from a hosting provider. Right.

Justin Edelstein: That was in the movie though. So we can't really dig that.

Jason Atwood: We know like 99% of the stuff. Not 99. We know a lot of stuff in that movie. Like the idea that he did all this for a girl. Apparently he had a girlfriend from before he started Facebook up until today. The same girlfriend. So like that he did all this for a girl is like...

Justin Edelstein: It's pretty lame. He should have a different girlfriend now.

Jason Atwood: It's still a great movie, great soundtrack, content reservoir. It's my... It's my... Shouldn't you have a different girlfriend now? Like, than before? No, that means it's nice and longevity. It means that she wasn't out for the money. You're saying you should have more girlfriends now?

Justin Edelstein: She should have like seven of them. Okay. One in every country. Let's move on. Actually, one other thought

Jason Atwood: to the two-factor authentication back on that. Because we were just playing around with an application that allows you to do something we were talking about adding to our blog, to blog.archessink.com, which allows you to comment on things And it uses a website called Disqus, D-I-S-Q-U-S. DAN HOLEVOETT.

Justin Edelstein: A web name. JONATHAN BERIENI. A web name, yes. DAN HOLEVOETT. A web company name. JONATHAN BERIENI.

Jason Atwood: But the interesting thing is that it allows you to comment on someone's blog, but not have to authenticate with them. You authenticate through some other service. So OpenID, Yahoo, Facebook, or Twitter. And then it made me think, as we were talking about this two-factor thing, wow, in some ways people are going more highly secure. In some ways, we're doing all this cross-pollination of authenticating here, and then I'm authenticated on seven other places, and not really understanding that. Does the average person know when they click authenticate here what that means and what information is being passed from Twitter to or from Facebook to that site or to that service? In this case, it would be on our site. It would be using a third-party service and then authenticating to another third party. So it's three different places to authenticate off of. Interesting to see how.

17:31 Justin Edelstein: scaring people away from commenting on our blog.

Jason Atwood: Well, it doesn't exist yet, so don't worry about it. But it will. It will exist.

Justin Edelstein: Coming soon to a blog near you.

Jason Atwood: So let's talk about the big news of the week, which was Super Bowl 45, Pittsburgh Steelers versus Drake. No, we're not a podcast that talks about NFL sports, are we? No, not at this moment. But the big news for the Salesforce world was Chatter. Commercials. It was the Chatter commercial, which we talked about last week.

Justin Edelstein: With the little baby peas.

Jason Atwood: With the baby peas.

Justin Edelstein: Whatever they're called. The mini-P's.

Jason Atwood: For anybody who missed the Super Bowl and the commercials, it was two 15-second spots before and after the Black Eyed Peas did a suitable halftime show. Which I actually thought was really good, just because it was, I like to say it was current. I don't like when they're

Justin Edelstein: You liked the halftime show itself, is what you're saying.

Jason Atwood: Because I like that they take a current artist that a lot of people care about and that are in the sort of mind as opposed to just dragging someone out of the closet who was good.

Justin Edelstein: They did, you know, Fergie was the first female performer since Janet Jackson during halftime. I mean, they used to have like Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson up there dancing and doing stuff. But then she showed her, you know, her miscellaneous.

Jason Atwood: She had a malfunction. It cost you a malfunction.

Justin Edelstein: And I'm trying to keep this so it doesn't have to be censored.

Jason Atwood: Yes. Take it out and post.

Justin Edelstein: Take it out. And Fergie is actually the first female artist back up on stage at halftime since then. Since James Jackson. So I guess the NFL was sort of scared for a little while. Like, let's roll out the Who and Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen or whoever else, right? You two. So yeah, I mean, they brought in the Black Eyed Peas. He's like, that was all right. I mean, the audio wasn't great. You couldn't really hear too much.

Jason Atwood: No, the audio was the worst part. I heard in the stadium, I had a friend who was at Super Bowl and they said, in the stadium it sounded great.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I mean they had Usher coming down from the ceiling.

Jason Atwood: Axl Rose coming up from the stage. Sorry, not Axl Rose. Slash. Slash coming up. That was good. Singing stuff. Anyway, let's not talk about that. Whatever.

Justin Edelstein: But the commercials were good because they led in, right in, with the Black Eyed Peas featured in the commercial and then out after the Black Eyed Peas had performed with the Black Eyed Peas in the commercial. the Black Eyed Peas and Salesforce have to do with each other other than Will.I.Am and Marc Benioff being best friends now? Not sure.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I'm wondering a little bit like, I haven't read the whole story, but because we saw obviously Will.I.Am was at Dreamforce. Yes. Which was less than 90 days ago. They did say they did this in 90 days. Over chatter. Over chatter. So then I'm wondering, okay, so how did that relationship start? I kind of thought, oh, maybe it was that he invited the Dreamforce event. No, obviously he was there because they were doing this, and that's what all the song and all the stuff. So let's just get your take on, I'll only take on two things. And then I'll give you my take. Chatter.com, free chatter, and then the commercials itself, what do you think? What do you think that they did or didn't do? What did you like them?

20:43 Justin Edelstein: So I commented on this sort of right after on various online forums but I'll repeat it for the members of this podcast, for the listeners. I thought the commercials themselves didn't do a great job of conveying the message of what chatter was. I was sitting in a room watching the game with 10 other people. I had a party at our apartment for the Super Bowl and I said to everybody, I said, there There are two commercials that I want to see and don't want you guys talking through, because everyone's just talking the whole time. And they're these commercials. So if you don't mind just being quiet, I know exactly when they're coming so I can see them and hear them because I want to know about them. So they came and went, and people after the halftime performance, they looked at me and they said, that's what you wanted to see? Like that, what was that? Like no one even got what it was.

Justin Edelstein: One person who was probably the most technically savvy person in the room said, what is that, like the new Twitter? I wonder what they paid for that domain, chatter.com. And that was like his only comment. He didn't say what is that or how would I use that or why would anyone use that. So I don't think the message necessarily got across of what chatter.com actually is. With that said, my opinion on what chatter.com actually is.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, the free version.

Justin Edelstein: the free version chatter.com so chatter.com I actually am doing an experiment right now with my family I went grabbed a domain name for my family to use set up you know everyone with an email on the on the domain so that everyone could get a login to our private little chatter org told them to put it on their mobile devices the chatter mobile throw it on your mobile so you don't have to check the email you can just log into this whenever you want right that's not a notification but nevermind yeah that'll come and I imagine but anyway you know I'd be hard-pressed to as a business find a good reason to use straight-up chatter calm for anything more than just an initial experiment to see what it could be because I'd be hard-pressed to come with the business case that would say all right let's use this collaboration platform that doesn't really necessarily connect to anything else at the moment.

Justin Edelstein: Now for a Salesforce.com user obviously chatter is built right in and it makes a whole lot more sense because it connects to other relevant business objects and data within the platform but as a straight-up you know Yammer competitor I mean, I think it's really just more of a land grab and a name recognition thing for Salesforce as opposed to a well thought out strategy from my perspective at this very moment. Maybe there's more to it in six months down the road, but right now I don't see it.

23:55 Jason Atwood: Do you have any more caveats you want to throw in there today, January?

Justin Edelstein: I think I hedged enough. Okay.

Jason Atwood: So first of all, the commercials. I actually thought the first commercial was OK. I thought the second commercial was bad. So the first commercial, 15 seconds is not a lot of time to get information across. And to spend on a product, again, I'm an Apple fanboy, so I think Apple does a better job of saying, we're not going to tell you about stuff. We're just going to show you stuff. Because the idea that a picture says a thousand words, well, if you can show someone the usefulness of using an iPhone and taking a call and making and looking up a restaurant and playing Sudoku and playing Angry Birds all within a phone within 15 seconds. They go, ooh, that looks like stuff I would do. Having animated Black Eyed Peas run around and say I did this and I did that was almost too fast to follow. And again, lost in the hustle of the Super Bowl. The second one with the making anything possible and kind of making animated figures like the donkey and the elephant kiss, I thought was a waste of money.

Jason Atwood: That means nothing to anybody. And in fact, it takes something that should be something that's useful. I think it would have been better if they just put up go2chatter.com. They said, free Chatter licenses, go2chatter.com for 15 seconds. That would have been a more useful use of that time than having that animated thing. So that was sort of the commercials. I love the fact that Salesforce is at the point in their career or as a company that they're thinking about getting out there to the masses. I don't feel like, I don't know how much they spent on this, but I don't feel like this is a great use of Salesforce.com marketing dollars because the Super Bowl, other than the great buzz you get before and after, unless it's negative buzz, which is that, oh, you're in the Super Bowl, that's a great thing, and the frogs, and there's always a talk of it weeks before and weeks after about who was there, as opposed to any other commercial that ever airs that no one cares. It airs, and if you see it, this time we actually talk about commercials. So in that way, it's a good use. But again, I just think kind of wasted on the execution.

Jason Atwood: Second point is chatter.com free, or free chatter. I'm going to caveat myself that I love chatter. We actually have been using it. I was in a pilot before it came out. I've been using it for a while. We're big users of other collaboration tools, but we're using Chatter and Chat more and more now, like with the new reply to features and things like that.

Justin Edelstein: It has matured over the last year since it went GA to a very usable, very useful product.

Jason Atwood: And we're building it more and more into our process. And our culture. Whether it's process management, project management, whether it's opportunities, whether it's account management, whether it's just actually communicating, text, email, chatter, wave, we have a lot, this is one of the ways. And it's becoming better and better. So for that, great. But I don't get chatter.com free. You say it's a land grab, great. A free land grab to spend your money on, because it's a land grab but you're paying for the land, to do what with? I can't see people using the opportunity to upgrade from chatter free to Salesforce Enterprise. I can't see the meta-grading to anything. I don't think that that's a mental path of like, oh, I'm using this free collaboration product. Now I want to organize my company's data. I don't think that that, I think the people who even sign up for the free collaboration aren't even people who make the decisions about organizing the company data. So for that way, I just don't get it.

27:38 Justin Edelstein: But from a marketing perspective, if Marc Benioff can get up on stage at, we're going to see him in about a month in New York, right, at Cloud Force New York. And we'll do a podcast before then, and probably after, to recap it. He can get up on stage and say, we now have, instead of 60,000 customers using Chatter, we now have 140,000 companies using Chatter.com. Maybe they're using it, maybe they just one person went in and signed up for an account. It's a way for him to pump numbers up and be like, we now of all these people using this. And it's a factoid.

Jason Atwood: I guess. I mean, OK, great factoid to have.

Justin Edelstein: It's the largest collaboration software as a service platform, yada yada. Great.

Jason Atwood: Still don't see the, still, I get it from a marketing perspective, and maybe the dollars and cents work out. Again, I'm looking at it from, I'm also looking at it from a customer of Salesforce, not one customer, two. I mean, I pay for too many licenses. I'm also looking at it from, okay, so all the money and resources that are going into running those servers to running that platform are being taken away from putting money into other things that us paying customers might want to use. So it's an interesting, giving away something for free means that someone's paying for it. And the reality is that we as Salesforce licensees, people who pay for our licenses, are paying for them to play around on the Chatter.com free thing. And I don't see where the value's coming back to us as the paying members. Meaning, and I know it's not a membership, I know it's like a, you know, but it's different when you buy a product once. That's the difference between a subscription model and a buying a product. I buy my MacBook, I go home, Apple has my money. That's it. Whatever they wanna do from then on, I can agree with and not agree with. But Salesforce takes my money, well, they take our money quarterly. They take our money quarterly or monthly or yearly. And so there is sort of a connection to the company, which is good for them and bad, good and bad. But the bad is, when they're doing things like Super Bowl commercials and animated Black IPs and giving away a free product, it makes me wonder what other resources, what other things could have been developed. When I look at the lack of features in some things, like lack of event notifications, when someone says I'm coming to your event that you did through Salesforce or not, it doesn't even send you an email to tell you. So the millions of dollars that just went into producing putting a Super Bowl commercial and doing chatter.com and hosting it and upkeeping it what could have that money been used to enhance the platform that

Justin Edelstein: we know enough you you are a subscriber to a service but you're not like a shareholder where you have a say in you know where the value has to come back to you because you're paying them on a quarterly basis I don't really see that

Jason Atwood: but what there are the company that's not a one-off connection but there are

Justin Edelstein: things that they can potentially learn from the way that chatter-free users start using the platform that they can then incorporate back into the platform that we get from it, right? Maybe they weren't thinking of different ways that people used it or different ways that people use the group's edition or use the email reply or whatever it may be, it's just a different user base for them to study behavior and add things back in that you might be transparent to you but you don't realize, oh, that actually came from someone who started up a chatter-free thing and has 4,000 users on it and is using it in this pretty interesting way. And all of a sudden, that kind of stuff gets baked back into the platform. I don't necessarily see the whole, well, I'm paying you and now you're giving this away for free and I should have gotten some features thing. I mean, that, I don't see it.

31:26 Jason Atwood: Here's another way to think about it. There's a certain point where a company starts expanding too fast. It starts putting resources into the next greatest thing. That they stop paying attention to things that either made them good at the start. And this is the go back to the rework book that we read, where 37 Signals, basically their concept is we do what we do, we do it well. And when we enhance something, it's small. But we are wanting to make this product, and it's not going to be 1,000 times better the next month or whatever. This is the product. It's very good. It does what it does. Salesforce likes to go for the next best thing. The problem with that is how many times does the last guest thing get left in the dust? And can I point to many examples of Salesforce? Again, huge Salesforce fanboy. I don't want to get any angry tweets. Actually, angry tweet me all you want. But how many times has the last greatest thing get left in the dust, ideas, content, whatever, that was the greatest thing the year before.

Jason Atwood: But now, when's the last time you heard a big, in this last release, I don't think there was any upgrade to Ideas. Nothing. Nothing for Ideas. Not one feature. Prove me wrong, but I think, I'm just doing it off the top of my head. I don't think there was one enhancement to Ideas in this last release. DAN HOLEVOETT. Nope. JONATHAN BERIENI. Content. I think maybe they had some kind of chatter thing to Content. But I don't think anything else was really added to Content, maybe an API or two. DAN HOLEVOETT.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but it's all connected to Chatter. But you mentioned books like Rework and the 37th. 37 signals. They were 27. Yeah. But you know there are other books that talk about you know like the innovators dilemma where when do you when do you actually decide to move forward and you know there are the products that you make now that have been building up your company but we need to move forward otherwise we're gonna be left behind so they have to make a hard choice and decision and you only have so many resources to put into so many things and if they see the future as what they're working on then then that's where they see it and that's where they're going. You know it's like oh we make we make the best desktop printers ever. We're just gonna keep making desktop printers and then laser printers come around or what have you.

Jason Atwood: It's the last buggy whip example. Yeah so we make this awesome thing and we're just

Justin Edelstein: gonna keep hammering away at it whether whether someone else comes around and does something new and different and innovative that that kicks our butt butt because we stopped innovating.

Jason Atwood: But do you see the difference between that and products that they release every year on a release schedule and then the next year that literally, you can literally see like the product gets shot below.

Justin Edelstein: Well I mean they know who's using it for what and how and if they see that oh this didn't work, why keep sinking money into something that, or resources into something that is either not working or they don't think is the next. You know.

34:26 Jason Atwood: The counter argument is how long did you sink your resources into it. Yes, I agree. Going after something for 10 years, like I'll give you an example, Google Wave. They sunk their, I'm air quoting here, they sunk their resources into Google Wave. We feel, as people who actually use it and think it's one of the best tools we've been using in the last five years, that they didn't actually market it well enough. They didn't take enough time and actually try to push it to where it could have gone. And they gave up way too early. So what I'm suggesting is sometimes when you go to that next thing, you're not actually spending the time and energy, the intestinal fortitude, to make sure that the last thing you just gave up on, did you really try to take it to the highest level? Or are you just seeing the shiny bobble on the street and then moving on to that? And again, with the time frames we're looking at from what Salesforce releases, it looks a little bit more like shiny bobble than it does, they spent five years building out the ideas platform and it didn't work. So Google Wave, we spent 20 years trying to make Google Wave work, and it clearly didn't work, so we had to disable it. Content, these aren't things that happen within a seven-year period. These are things that happen within six months. And then the next six months, it's kind of, I'm not saying devalued, but it just seems to me that there's a time and attention span that they have on certain products. And once they move off, if you're the contracts or if Your solutions, you are the oldest, most backdated little thing. I was surprised in this release they had spring release, they had something for product line items. Because it's one of those things that feels very old. It has this really old feel to it. What do we use to call it? Second class or third class objects? Not a first class object. And then things like we thought were going to come out. Like where's the new opportunity layout?

Justin Edelstein: It's in the service console.

Jason Atwood: Where is it on the opportunity? It's on the service console. OK. So anyway, that's Chatter. If you want to read more, actually, our unnamed colleague, Larry, wrote a blog post at blog.ark to think about the commercial. I'm kind of hit over these points. Not at all in the depth that we just did. No. But interesting stuff. We are now on podcast, but hopefully interesting for you to hear some opinion about this as people who are pretty

Justin Edelstein: competitive banter.

Jason Atwood: So we're pretty deep in this product. Let's get to our Quad Focus app pick of the week. Can you go first? Let's do it.

Justin Edelstein: And since we've been talking about Chatter, I pick a Chatter product.

Jason Atwood: Let me guess, it's a Force.com Labs.

Justin Edelstein: It's not a Force.com Labs product. Although, shout out to Force.com Labs. This is a product called Amplify 4 Chatter. Amplify the number four Chatter, all one word, by Astadia. It was a big Salesforce consulting and product partner. I made it I got made aware of this product via a Webinar that they held for the Salesforce foundation. It's sort of geared towards a nonprofit audience And you can find that if you just look for Amplify for chatter, you know type that into Google and you'll find it either on the Salesforce channel or Or the foundation channel on YouTube, but anyway getting into what the product does it is an integration method for chatter to go out and post your chatter both internally but also select to post it to Facebook page or Twitter feed so each

37:56 Justin Edelstein: individual user can have their own you know Facebook page or Twitter feed that they're posting their chatter to or it can be the company's or organization's Facebook page and Twitter page or feed. So when I go ahead and type in you know something about Arcus in my chatter feed I can check off a box, hit post, and not only does it post it to chatter but it posts it to my Facebook wall or to my Twitter feed. If someone replies to the comment on Facebook or on Twitter it it gets brought back into my Chatter feed within the Salesforce org. So I can from right there within Chatter have these conversations with both the internal folks within my Salesforce org that are seeing it in Chatter and the external world out on Facebook or Twitter right from one interface. Can also take some actions on the incoming tweets like create a case from it or create a lead or what have you. Some interesting stuff, very cool. I suggest watching a demo, it's like a 20 to 25 minute demonstration that you can find on YouTube. How much? Pricing, I was getting there. So, Estadia wouldn't say exactly what the pricing was, they said it's approximately $8,000, one time fee for installation and sort of customization of the product. It's a private AppExchange listing, You can't just go to the AppExchange and install it. They won't let you do it, because they believe it requires professional services to customize it to your exact needs. What that means, I'm not sure. But they said it's approximately $8,000, one time fee to install, and they can sort of customize it in any which way that you want it to be customized. Interesting.

Jason Atwood: I would definitely, I mean, $8,000 makes it a little bit, You know, again, for a big company, I could see, oh, $8,000, not a big deal. For the average company that wants to add in that little functionality, I could see someone going out and building a very quick and easier, like, Facebook, maybe not 2A, but the Facebook, Twitter one, so I could just, when I posted a chatter, I could hit these two buttons, one's Facebook, one's Twitter, and it does one or the other, or do both, kind of like what we talk about with Foursquare does that I like and make that a much lower cost, like just two buttons that click, click, and that's what happens. The other thing is it certainly breaks every enterprise's first question about chatter is, does this go outside our walls? And is this the problem?

Justin Edelstein: So this is not for an enterprise. This is for a nonprofit organization that has a large either volunteer base or membership base that they communicate with outside. And this is a way to do it from inside of Salesforce.

40:58 Jason Atwood: And I think you can do this with Seesmic Desktop, because Seesmic Desktop has a Chatter Include. I have not got it to work. I've tried. I actually went this morning to try to get it to work again, but that you can then install a Chatter API in your Seesmic Desktop that when you chat, you can then send it to different places at the same time. Again, it won't do the multi-conversation.

Justin Edelstein: and won't do the actions.

Jason Atwood: No, it won't do the actions, right. I want to take actions. But very cool. Very cool.

Justin Edelstein: So what's your pick?

Jason Atwood: My pick is actually something that is kind of odd, because it sort of doesn't happen very often. It's a new email client. Really? Yeah. New email clients don't come around that often. You basically stuck with your Outlook, stuck with your Mail.app, stuck with your Gmail. Web clients, fine, tons of them. But an offline email client. And I found this through.

Justin Edelstein: a Thunderbird type of thing?

Jason Atwood: Thunderbird's been around for a long time. Yes, but it's a third party. It's called Sparrow. I found it on the Mac App Store. I actually tweeted it the other day. It's on the Mac App Store. And that alone is interesting. That's the ability for me to click and just install stuff from the cloud. Just automatically comes down, charges to my iTunes account. Very cool.

Justin Edelstein: Is it for the Mac, or is it for the mobile also?

Jason Atwood: It's for Mac only. Mac only. And it works with only Gmail right now, or Google Apps and Gmail.

Justin Edelstein: It seems a little limited.

Jason Atwood: Well, but it is very, very simple. It's a very simple, easy to use, looks like the new Twitter, right? It's got the, on one hand, it's got the sort of your picture, and then inbox, outbox, whatever, just like the new Twitter does. And it does the sort of, the things can come over, they slide out, and it's $10. So it's like a very simplified mail.app, but then looks like Twitter, it does all the inline replying, it does all the threading, it does all that kind of nice features. So it's kind of a mix between what that Twitter app looks like and what Gmail looks like.

Justin Edelstein: I'm looking at you with a raised brow.

Jason Atwood: The reason is it's simplified. You can do the tagging inside of it. It's an offline Gmail app. But looks and feels great. Feels good.

Justin Edelstein: Are you using it?

Jason Atwood: I used it to test it because I was like, is there going to be some features in there that I'm like, oh my goodness.

Justin Edelstein: But it can only connect with Gmail. Right now.

Jason Atwood: It will be able to check with IMAP in the next few days.

Justin Edelstein: So like Gmail, meaning like our Gmail. Yep. I have it up. So any Gmail. Have it up on our Gmail. So not just Gmail.com, anyone who's using Google Apps.

Jason Atwood: And again, it looks like, if you know Twitter for the Mac or Twitter even for the iPad, it looks like that, that it has sort of the left pane and things slide out to the side. It's kind of a new take on email, right? making it look more conversational. It's called Sparrow. It's $10, so at $10. I'll say the Mac App Store does have a problem because you can't test drive stuff. They've got to get that. They've got to give me a 10-day. So I bought it because I just was interested. It had some high reviews. Everyone was loving it. And it works. And since it's all online and all in the cloud, that's making my cloud thing. Not that the application came from the cloud, but then it's using a cloud service. But it's very lightweight. It doesn't take up a lot of resources. And I could see it for someone who doesn't want to get it. Because Mail.app, while great, and that's one of my favorite programs on the planet, has a little bit of like, well, if you do this, and if you do this, if you do this, as opposed to this, I could throw this in front of anybody and say, use it. And they'd be like, oh, there's my inbox. And there's my this. And that's how I hit reply. And it's just.

44:34 Justin Edelstein: It does look very simple. I'm looking over your shoulder now. Yeah. And it looks nice.

Jason Atwood: It does the conversation stuff that looks like.

Justin Edelstein: So it does the threads? Does the threading. And you can star things.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, you can do all the stuff you can do on Twitter. It looks alright. Yeah. So, again.

Justin Edelstein: Is it buggy or you haven't really used it enough to know? It works great. Pulls from address book or pulls from Gmail contacts?

Jason Atwood: Let's see. Good example. I will pull from my address book. Oh, so it's integrated. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, you know, again, 10 bucks. For Mac users. For Mac users. It's called Sparrow.

Justin Edelstein: Mac users who've been, I'm trying to find the right word, but looked down upon by the folks who do force.com flow. Oh yes. Because I want to try that, but I can't because I don't have a PC. All right. Thanks guys. All righty. So, we'll end up the podcast. That was our crowd focused app picks of the week.

Jason Atwood: We have, remember to go to blog.archisync.com to check up all our blogs. We blog about once a week. take a rotation and also post all the podcasts there. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com slash arcusinc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. I'm at twitter.com slash jasonmattwood. And Justin's at twitter.com slash justedelstein. We're on Facebook, facebook.com slash arcusinc. And iTunes, that's where you subscribe to the podcast, go there, leave a great review. We really like it and appreciate it. Tell us what we're doing right or wrong, mostly right. Five stars and above. And again, you click there, like we're recording this on a Friday, so we didn't record it yesterday, so you would, if you didn't know that, but you can always follow us on Twitter as well. But until next week, and as always, enjoy those cloudy days.