Attending Dreamforce 2009, as with every one of Salesforce.com's conferences you know that an exciting game-changing announcement is in the works. This year provided one that I believe could be monumental.
Chatter.
"Chatter" is Salesforce's new "Facebook for the enterprise." It essentially takes the "feed, follow, and profile" features and best practices of Facebook and Twitter, and applies them to the CRM cloud model that is currently in place. What it creates is an tool where anything that is worked within Salesforce.com or communicates with Salesforce.com can "talk" to you through a live feed that is similar to the one that you see when you log into Facebook and view the news feed.
In Mark Benioff's keynote, he made this statement that I believe is the core reason why this may really take off (especially in younger companies but is not limited to). He asked "Why is it that I know when one of my 5,000 Facebook 'friends' have gone to a certain movie but I don't know when my VP of Sales has visited a key client?" The point is this: social networking has greatly enhanced our abilities to organize our social lives and disseminate information in our personal lives, so why can't we have these same abilities in our businesses? Why can't the same automatic notification I get when a picture of me from a party has been tagged come when a creative brief that I'm collaborating on has just had a key revision?
In business today, I have to either be proactive, I have to get alerted through my dedicated communications system (Outlook or IM... all disparate) or someone has to take the initiative to push the information I need out to me. In social networking, I get all of my information socially from the feed. Essentially, "Chatter" is their attempt to bring this metaphor and this "integration of people, applications, and data" into a single collaboration engine that is familiar to those of us that use tools like Facebook, which statistically is most, if not all of us.
Time will tell whether this bet will pay off... and if business will indeed transform based on this new metaphor. However, considering that SalesForce.com's initial inspiration for SaaS was Amazon.com (another highly successful consumer web application), they may be on to something.
According to the folks I talked to at Dreamforce, expect Chatter to hit your Cloud in Summer '10. However, their Safe Harbor statements indicate that we shouldn't put all our chips on this quite yet, but it will be exciting to see what it brings to the table when it is generally available.
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