Project Snowball - Episode #7 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 seventh episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week, September 2010. This episode titled Project Snowball. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me right here in person is co-host, Justin Edelstein. Hey Justin, how you doing?

Justin Edelstein: I'm doing great. This is fun. We turned our office into a recording studio.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so the the the podcast and the Arcus offices have moved from being in The garage being in the garage to now being in a real office, and we have a brand new Recording studio here aka the snowball mic which is sitting between us right now. It's uh it is

Justin Edelstein: We're reviewing it as we speak.

Jason Atwood: Yes, it's good. It has a red light on the top of it. It's big and snowbally, although it's black. Ours is a black model, not the white model, so it doesn't look much like a snowball.

Justin Edelstein: We have the on-air light on the side.

Jason Atwood: Yes. We're hoping no one busts into the office to ask us some crazy question. So, let's talk a little bit about our agenda today. Well, we're back, so that's a good thing. Justin, while I was away on vacation, did a great Google Voice within Gmail blog post. We talk about that. We have a little bit of Twitter news, some news about the free trials on AppExchange, some Apple Cloud news, if you will, a couple things that they're releasing that have effect on the cloud as in general, including a new social network. And then we'll finish up with our Cloud Focus app pick of the week, if I actually write mine in there.

Justin Edelstein: It rolls right off the tongue. It does. It comes back.

Jason Atwood: So, well, we are back. That's the first thing off. Let's talk a little bit about your blog post. What did you post when I was away? Did you read it? I of course read it because I commented on it before you posted it.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, well, for all those who haven't read it. I wrote a column, or a blog post if you will, about Google and how they are striving to include everything productivity in Gmail, which makes a whole lot of sense. know Gmail and email in general is sort of the hub of most people's productivity suite in general. You know you get to work, you open your email, you go home, you look at your email, you have your email on your phone, you pretty much do email everywhere and that's where you keep your task lists and your to-do items and Google is making a big move to make Gmail the place where you do your work. They've taken the website, gmail.com, which when it launched was this sort of email and turned it into a full-fledged, almost platform, if you will, where you can extend Gmail.

Justin Edelstein: They themselves, and the topic of this whole blog post was about the Gmail voice and chat, or voice and video chat, that is now enabled, where you can make free calls to anyone in the US or Canada and a lot like Skype they have you know outgoing call rates for pennies or ten cents at a time, nimes at a time, to foreign nations which is really interesting because they are you know sitting on top of this you know the bandwidth the actual plug that you plug into the back of your computer or to your router to get Wi-Fi, and then are sort of skipping over the telephone company to actually make telephone calls through their service right from within your email client. So it's actually quite an interesting move. Brings a whole lot of new features into Gmail, and makes Gmail even more of a productivity suite.

04:01 Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, it moves it away from Google Voice, which has always had some of these features. I think it's interesting to watch them, especially if you've known the podcast for a while now and read some of it, we're lamenting the fact that they're going to kill off Google Wave, but in this way maybe this is showing us some of the path of what they're going to do with some of the technologies in Google Wave is move them in, take them, instead of having these separate things, you jump from Calendar to Gmail to Voice to Wave to Docs, I think the path is they're going to integrate them more and more, which I think is certainly interesting. You know, it's funny because we are huge Gmail users, but I'm not a huge Gmail user because I don't actually go to the Gmail client at all. I use Mail on the Mac, so it's very rare that I go into actual Gmail, so I went in to test this feature of course, and I'm like, oh, look at all the neat stuff in here, and I turned off my out of office from Gmail, and I was impressed. only is it a great feature, start and end date, which is nice, and then when you log back in it has it across the top, you know, this is turned on. So I don't know, stuff that I guess I only thought about in Outlook as a long-term Outlook user, you know, seeing those features show up in Gmail, it's nice. I was pleasantly surprised and gives me some hope that Google Wave and its thing will come back and in some sort of way, either in Docs or Gmail. So the next thing is There's actually some little Twitter news. Twitter has done a couple of things in the last couple days. They're announcing two things, really, two big news announcements. One is that they're making all their applications go under OAuth, right? Mm-hmm. Which, I mean, it changes the way, but what are your immediate thoughts about them going through OAuth?

Justin Edelstein: Well, immediately, that to me is not a huge deal for the end user. Maybe for the developer the developers that are listening, there might be some easier, better ways to connect your application or third party app to Twitter. But to me, the more interesting news that they've come out with is the URL shortener, their new T.co, which they've been testing for a little while and it has been out, but it's going to be essentially the standard for all apps that are connected to Twitter. So if you're using any Seesmic desktop or Hootsuite or Tweety, they're all going to be using T.CO, which has some real implications for folks like Bitly and all the other URL shorteners that are out there, because they've sort of made their nut on connecting themselves to Twitter. why else, no one goes to like Bitly to shorten an URL to then send it an email.

Jason Atwood: Tiny URL, I actually did that the other day. On vacation, I went, I put in my, cause I'm super geek. So I built out, I went on a road trip. So I built out the road trip map, right? Of where we were going, each destination. And then I wanted to send it to people. But when I went to go to send link, the link was literally this huge long link. So I went to Tiny URL and shortened it to put in the email because I wanted them to be able to get to the map link, but not have it. Because sometimes, some mail clients change them, make them smaller, whether it's on the iPhone or maybe in mail. They just don't get that it's too cut the earl. So I actually did that. Fair enough.

07:37 Justin Edelstein: The main use case for those earl shorteners is Twitter to fit your long, enormous Amazon product Google map right into a hundred and forty character tweet with some commentary around it. So that it'll be interesting to see what happens to some of these are all shortening services and if they stay around because you know a lot of them even the the Salesforce for Twitter product uses a bitly account to shorten earls through Salesforce when you're using that product it'll be interesting now to see if that has to change or if it will just automatically change. Some of these companies might have a hard time existing moving forward because it really is the the main driver of those services. Certainly that of

Jason Atwood: their earl shortening but I know that Google's doing their own thing they're gonna come out with their own earl shortener because obviously just like I was expressing like I want someone to shorten it for me and why shouldn't they do it but there's still tons of social networks. I actually think it's more interesting that people are still sticking to the 140 characters which was an SMS limitation originally so you think I don't know I know we're it's now kind of like ubiquitous except for Facebook but almost everywhere like we've been playing around Foursquare recently and checking in on becoming a mayor of many many places including the Arcus office but you know that's 140 characters as well and I and you know they built it whatever not not a year ago or not ten years ago. So people are sort of sticking, all social networks are sticking to that pattern that it has to be 140 characters. And here is, here's Twitter who can basically, since they're building in their own earl shortener, why even include that in the 140 characters? Why not just include it as like a sub piece of the, you know, like take the earl, shorten it down but don't include it as part of the 140 characters?

Justin Edelstein: No. That's crazy talk.

Jason Atwood: I don't know, but you know what I'm saying. It's like why, if you're building it into your service, the reason it's an earl shortener is because you're putting it in the tweet. But if you, but if you, but if, since the person, the earl going into tweet no longer is part, is being taken over by their own service, why not just pull it out at the 140? No. Okay. No, don't do that. All right, well.

Justin Edelstein: 140 characters, that's it.

Jason Atwood: This should have been, this podcast should have been the social networking site, be a lot of social news but let's get off some social news and talk about a little salesforce as we know we're big salesforce guys here so that's what we do for most of our days not so much the well I guess we do social networking as well. So salesforce has released a sort of they've been kind of moving down this path they first had the aloha apps which were your ability to, well let's back up. So Salesforce, software as a service, force.com platform, CRM and many other things. Then they have this thing called the AppExchange where basically it's the business, it's iTunes for business apps. So you go.

10:44 Justin Edelstein: Where you use their marketing language.

Jason Atwood: I am, well it's a good way of putting it. You can, from your Salesforce you can log into a marketplace which has a lot of applications that you can install, you can, you used to trials or sometimes they had test drives but they also had different versions like I know a period has two versions of sort of things one that's free one that's pay and they give you more features in the pay version so they kind of have done this it's kind of like it's kind of like actually iTunes in the App Store where people will have the light version but now they're allowing trials real trials which allows you to install these applications and there's thousands of them. They do everything from mass emailing to action plans to Google integrations to full on one of our current partners does recruiting and job science.

Justin Edelstein: One of the keys here is this is a game changer for one reason and one reason only. You used to have to have a Salesforce instance or license to use Salesforce.com to go to the app and and try something. These free trials, you don't have to be a Salesforce user. You can literally just go try an application and they send you a login to their application, which is a fully set up and pre-configured version of this

Jason Atwood: application sitting on top of Salesforce or force.com. So it's not a free trial in

Justin Edelstein: your org? No, it's a free trial of an app. It's really for ISVs to go out and build a product like job science like I mentioned but not own sales force whatsoever. Just go try job science. Forget the fact that it's even Salesforce. Go try it. It's got the configuration and sample data in it for you to play around with. Nice. And a login credential for you to play around with. That is

Jason Atwood: actually pretty good. And then you can purchase from there. I thought it was more, and I guess I didn't dig deep enough into it, but I thought it was more that you could try it in your org for a free period of time but you're saying so they basically give you because Salesforce has the ability to get you can sign up for a free trial of Salesforce so now they're just basically combining the two. Yep. You get the free trial of Salesforce with the pre-installed packages you don't have to do any work. With some sample data. With some sample data that's relevant to the

Justin Edelstein: product? That's right. It's a pre-configured version of the product so you really get to try before you buy a product built on top of the force.com platform. It really makes it more like a true...

Jason Atwood: Like chair wear.

Justin Edelstein: Or a true product offering as opposed to being so tied to the hip with Salesforce, which you sort of are when you're building on top of their platform, but it makes it more like you can actually try this product even if you don't own Salesforce.

Jason Atwood: That actually is interesting. So that's good. And the last thing actually happened yesterday, right? Which is, you know, it's hard because everything is sort of cloud related and not cloud related at the same time. But since there is lots of talk about Apple and their movement to the cloud, they have cloud offerings like MobileMe, which actually is cloud storage and all sorts of interesting things and syncing, which we both use. But so yesterday they announced a bunch of hardware. we don't care because it's not cloud specific. The one thing that they, two things I think are interesting for this for us to discuss, one of which I've tried and one of which I ordered this morning, is the, they have a new Apple TV, which is, okay, so how is that cloud related? Well, they're much more moving to the model of everything is, everything's hosted. So you used to be able to download to your Apple TV and I had actually upgraded mine to have a big disk in it so I could put a bunch of stuff on it. Now everything comes down either comes down from from you know the cloud from iTunes store you

14:44 Jason Atwood: can rent move you can rent movies that you always could do but you can rent TV shows which you couldn't do so the 9910 HD TV shows what I think is actually very good you know and it's smaller and there's no hard drive in it I think what's interesting that's kind of interesting or that's kind of cloud news even if you see the new features they're gonna put into it makes makes your kind of your environment all one big network and that you can be watching something on your iPad and then say, oh, I'm watching this movie. Let me just send this over to my, instantly while I'm watching it, send it over to my Apple TV. And then your iPad goes blank, your Apple TV starts up and you're basically streaming it from any device to your Apple TV in real time at any point. So I think it's very cool. There's something that Apple's doing with this big data center in North Carolina. Maybe it's part of this that they're scaling up because if they're basically renting more more movies right this thing's going to be $99 again I ordered mine this morning. 99 bucks so it's a great point. They also do Netflix streaming which is also huge because a lot of Netflix users don't like to switch to other devices to watch the same stuff. So I think that's big. Then on top of that there's the new iTunes. Fine iTunes it's got new features and all sorts of neat stuff.

Justin Edelstein: And in theory they have this Netflix app. Right. It's an app on the thing on the Apple TV right? Yeah. I mean, if they partnered with Apple, someone like Hulu from selling an app on the Apple TV.

Jason Atwood: Well, there's no app store for the Apple TV. That's the way everybody thought would happen. They'd do an app store and you'd be able to buy apps. This is just integrated just like YouTube.

Justin Edelstein: Right, but they could come up with a Hulu app because they have it on the iPad, don't they?

Jason Atwood: If Apple were to partner with them. Yes, but that's the problem is Apple's very specific. the App Store. Apple's very specific about its partners. They've obviously done Flickr, Yahoo, and YouTube. That brings the cloudiness to it, right? You don't have to have your photos on your computer. They can be up in Flickr. That all works. Come to MobileMe. That all works. But the second thing they released inside of what I think is much more interesting and we'll see how it goes, I signed up this morning and played around with it this morning, is their own social network. So they've kind of created, you know, Apple's saying listen we've got however many iTunes users I think it's like hundreds of millions. Lots of millions. Yeah and we're gonna create inside of iTunes our own social network they're calling it ping. My first connection was was it does it connect to other social networks? Did it connect to Twitter? It doesn't seem to it seems to be captured within which to me is a limitation because I like when you can connect things like we connect Foursquare to Twitter to Facebook, not all the time. I like the manual. I want to do it now but I don't want to do it tomorrow. So it is basically you have a profile, you have friends, you can follow people, you can follow, when you're playing music you can have that music show up on your profile so it's constantly, it's basically constantly telling what you're doing, what you're liking. So I think that's kind of cool. So if you and I are connected and I'm listening to some and you go over to my profile, you say, oh, you're listening to whatever.

17:57 Justin Edelstein: I got your invite this morning. You got to log in. I haven't upgraded to the new iTunes yet. Oh, okay. When I do that. It'll be interesting. That would be interesting.

Jason Atwood: And then you could follow groups. So like Lady Gaga.

Justin Edelstein: You could follow, yeah, famous people, right? But they're posting there too.

Jason Atwood: So it's not just following their releases. It's following them actually posting.

Justin Edelstein: And then what they're listening to. And then what they're listening to. It's sort of a super extension to those, remember they used to have those famous people playlists? Yes. I never really downloaded them but it was kind of interesting.

Jason Atwood: I'd go look when they were first out there. I thought they were interesting, right? But this, you know, it's only, it's kind of only big news because it's Apple and it's iTunes, which are so dominant now that it's like you can't not pay attention to it. I personally know with all the social networking now it does become a little bit like, okay, where are we going? What am I doing now? You know, am I hitting Facebook? That's why I like the connecting of them so that I don't have to too much worry. Am I over Twitter? Am I on Facebook? Am I Foursquare? Am I whatever? Am I in Ping now? And where am I updating this? But because it's very music movie related, I can really see the movie TV thing becoming even more interesting than the music. Because to me, I listen to music on iTunes, but I watch a lot of movies and TV through iTunes. And it started to track that stuff so you could see what movies I was watching or movies I had added. That could kind of, that to me gets a little more interesting.

Justin Edelstein: And the idea is that I would buy them because I saw that my friend was watching them.

Jason Atwood: And liked them or rated them or reviewed them. Podcasts would be interesting. You could see if I related or were listening to podcasts. So we'll have to see how that goes. Yeah, I will. Alright, well we're getting closer to end time here. So let's get on to the time, everything you've been waiting for. The Cloud Focus app pick of the week. And because I always make you go first, I'm going to make you go first again.

Justin Edelstein: You always make me go first. And I'm going to do sort of a, not really a specific app, but I like to follow force.com labs on Twitter. Twitter. It's twitter.com slash force.com labs all spelled out D-O-T-C-O-M labs and they've been doing tons and tons of work lately and recently there were a couple of cool apps that caught my eye that I thought were cool and useful. They put out their own earl shortener. Speaking of earl shorteners. So you can actually use a native force.com URL shortener to use with a site. So if you have a branded Salesforce site, you can use that URL to sort of shorten URLs. Anything that you want to point to, you can point to it using and they use it to post all their apps. You notice their apps are like force.com slash you know survey which is another one that is going to talk about right their new native survey app. A lot of people need or want to do surveys within Salesforce to their customers or to for customer service or clients or post implementation of something for services organizations so there's a native survey app now built on sites I just started playing with it in developer org it's it's kind of interesting and fun it's customizable enough to really get the job done so How much does it cost? It's cost free. And they also put out an update to the Salesforce for Twitter. So there's a new one I started playing with the new one when they came out with it you know version 2 and it didn't work so well so

21:50 Jason Atwood: they updated it now it works. So good on them. Nice nice so that's Forstacop Labs, lots of stuff. You got an Earl Shortener, you have a survey app and an integrated Twitter app for Salesforce. Nice. All for free. All for free. That's zero apps a month. From the

Justin Edelstein: AppExchange. From the AppExchange. AppExchange.com. Tie it all together. Earl Shortener is an

Jason Atwood: AppExchange. There you go. Tie it all together into a tight little snowball. Project Snowball. That's good. So mine's going to be something that actually came out this morning, related right back into Twitter. So a little history. There used to be an app called Tweety, done one of the best iPhone apps. Pretty best. Close. I don't know. I think it's very good. And Tweety was then bought by Twitter. And they had an iPhone app, but they didn't have an iPad app. So this morning, as I checked, as I often do, in the morning just click on anything new. Up came the new version of Twitter, renamed from Tweety, which is now universal for the iPhone and the iPad and the iPod Touch. Nice. And it is really nice because not only does it still work on the iPhone just like it always did, great, right? On the iPad it does this layering effect so when you're on you basically can look at a person or look at your feed, here's your feed, then you click on a mention, you click on the URL and it kind of overlays on top of it, like the website or whatever, so it doesn't take you out of context. It leaves you right in context. You can expand it and then you can, it's really done well. And so if you go to the profile, it overlays that a little bit. I was playing it with the one way, I didn't have a lot of time this morning but I'm sure if you flipped it the other way, it would do as well. Really well Well done, really beautifully designed and it's universal so it runs on both and it's free. I love universal apps and I even more love, so to keep our sort of social networking thing that is Twitter for the iPad or universal app iPad, iPod touch and iPhone from iTunes now owned by Twitter. So nice to know they're actually keeping up and building new apps. So that's it.

Jason Atwood: That's the podcast. Welcome back buddy. Wait. Welcome you back. What do you mean? I was along those way. So if you're interested in this and more of this type of conversation, we'd love for you to follow us on Twitter. You can follow the company, Arcus, at Twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. If you want to follow me, Jason, I'm at Twitter.com, J-A-C-E-N-C. Jason M. Atwood. And Justin is at twitter.com slash justetelstein. You can find all this on the website which is at Arcusinc.com. We have a blog which is blog.arcusinc and there's Facebook. Jeez, we're everywhere. Facebook.com slash arcusinc. Go there and we post the podcast. Really the most, if you really like the podcast and you want to listen to it on your new Apple TV subscribe to it in iTunes that's a really great way to do it because then you get the version it comes down leave a nice review there if you would we have

25:20 Jason Atwood: to scroll up some more reviews as the days go but that's it for this week thank you for joining the cloud focus weekly remember until next time enjoy those cloudy days