Just Ping Me - Episode #17 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 17th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the second week in November 2010. This episode is titled Just Ping Me. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing experts. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me, 17th time, Mr. Justin Edelstein. How are you doing, Justin? Very well, thank you. 17 weeks in the books. Pretty good. Not bad. We were just discussing our what we'll be doing at Dreamforce in terms of the podcast. So stay tuned for that.

Justin Edelstein: I think we should do podcasts from Dreamforce at the event.

Jason Atwood: We'll definitely do at Dreamforce at the event, but it's a question of do we do it every day, every minute?

Justin Edelstein: Why don't we leave it up to the listeners?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, we'll leave it up to the listeners.

Justin Edelstein: Tweet us or put something on our profile pages in the Dreamforce portal, let us know.

Jason Atwood: Go on over to Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. Any of those things. There you go. So we've got an agenda today. We do. talking about the good and bad use cases for force.com sites. It's a good one. Written by yours truly. Did a nice job. Got a lot of retweets today. Edited by yours truly. Yes it was. Twitter to integrate with Apple's ping. Talk about that. Salesforce is not moving beyond CRM. What does that mean? We'll talk about it. Then we'll finish up with a little announcement for Google App users. Announcement about voice. So let's get into it and then we'll do a cloud focus app pick of the week. So let's get into it and start off with the start, which is the blog post.

Justin Edelstein: Sure. You wrote it.

Jason Atwood: I wrote it, so I'll give a little, I'll tell you about it. So it's at blog.archessaic.com. And after doing, we've been doing sites for a while. Sites, let's talk about sites. So Salesforce sites, it's called force.com sites, announced in Dreamforce 2008, basically allowing you to build externally visible sites, websites, hosted on Salesforce's platform, distributed over their CDN, their content delivery network, which is a big thing. That's very big. The magic and the sauce is that you can then publish pieces of your content that you're tracking in Salesforce. Most people think about their tracking their accounts and contacts and opportunities, but if you were to track other data or that data, you could then publish it out to an external website, make it available. have interactions between clients and the data as well through authentication. So lots of cool stuff. So I basically outlined what I thought were some good use cases and some bad use cases based on our experience.

Jason Atwood: So good use cases, things like small landing pages and marketing pages if you're having ad campaigns because you can track the usage and have it go right into Salesforce. Low functioning sites. So I guess it's a combination of what is a good case, a low functioning site meaning a brochure-like type site or a site that has 15, 20, 30 pages interlinked. There's a lot of good features in Salesforce or force.com sites, but one of them is not sort of the content management piece. So anything Salesforce connected, including portal, if you're extending the portal, obviously if you're exposing data from Salesforce, that's a great use of Salesforce sites, force.com sites. out of the box. If you want to use ideas or knowledge and expose that, you can do so using force.com sites and those are really good uses. Not so good uses or I said bad uses, I probably should come up with, I should have said not so good. I wonder if I'm going to get like an email from Salesforce.

03:50 Justin Edelstein: Since you're using a content management system and not force.com sites to publish your website, you could probably change that with a couple clicks of a button.

Jason Atwood: I could. Bad uses? Highly complex things. The reality is that the space of building websites, the content management sites, content management systems out there for building websites, both the in-house paid versions and the versions that are available via open source are stunning. There are incredible amounts of complex functionality, workflows and alerts and for very little money. You don't need a Salesforce license. You can host thousands of users. You can build in things like forums and blogs and polls with the click of a button. All that type of stuff needs to be built into Salesforce. It could come in certainly in different ways, but right now, if you want to build a poll on your force.com site, you'd have to build out the functionality, which would require code and wouldn't be just add a new product. So I think they're coming, but those are sort of some of the things that I would say are bad uses. Overall, again, we're big fans of it.

Jason Atwood: I think it has some great ways to be used. It's just not, don't think that, oh, I'm going to build the next amazon.com on force.com sites. There's limitations in bandwidth for your users. There's all sorts of other little things that you might want to consider. So what do you think? Anything? Good article.

Justin Edelstein: Some good use cases come out of it, particularly the Salesforce connected portion of your good uses. We work with a lot of not-for-profit organizations and I can think of a very easy use case for not-profits if they were to want to publish all their donors that donate over a certain amount of money. They could very easily write a page that would pull any donor that's given over this amount in this year and put it up on a site, make it external and not have to actually manage that. You're already managing that data within Salesforce, you're already doing that, so why have to manage it somewhere else where it could be different and disconnected? You could even then put a chart, shoot the data out to Google API, which was my Cloud focus app pick of the week last week. Yes it was. And put a chart up there breaking down you know X percent is public funding, X percent private funding, etc.

Justin Edelstein: So there's a lot of good use cases for for why you would use force.com sites for even just bits and pieces of your overall website. I think that's sort of

Jason Atwood: thing if you have something in Salesforce that you're tracking and you want to make you want to expose it that might not mean you build a whole website website at force.com sites, but you could use iframes which are a way of including external content so it can look seamless, you can use subdomaining, so we have blog.argocync.com versus www so you can subdomain things. So there's lots of different ways. It is very good as a product, but again, it has some limitations like all products. And I can't wait to see what they do with it going forward because they've already made leaps and bounds, they've included Google Analytics, they've included a lot of things, I think there's a lot of stuff yet to come. So that was the blog post as it was. Next article up or next thing on the agenda is to talk about, actually something interesting we talked about a while ago, which was Apple's foray into social networking, which is a product called Ping.

07:21 Justin Edelstein: Which I still haven't used.

Jason Atwood: Good job. It's built into iTunes and allows you to, basically it's a social networking inside iTunes that allows you to talk about and comment on and like artists who then are sort of posting their statuses. And then as you buy things, it can then say, oh, Jason Atwood just bought Who Let the Dogs Out by the Baja Boys, Baja Man or whatever that was. And then other people, if you were in my friend network, you'd be able to see that, you'd be able to buy it. It has, it had like an amazing, a million people signed up for it for the first day. But then, since then, it's kind of like, one of the reasons was because they were going to integrate with Facebook. Facebook said no or they couldn't get the terms right whatever they kind of they were gonna do it I think Steve Jobs when he announced it said within a week or within whatever never happened apparently the negotiations are still going on we talked about having one social network but there's another social network that has actually agreed to to integrate with ping and that's Twitter I think this actually gives so Twitter's announced that they're going to allow integration with ping you're gonna be able to do things in ping and have them publish out to Twitter, have those things be linkable back to buy things in iTunes. It's a major step. I think first of all it plays the hand of Facebook saying, hey listen, you're not the only social network out there in the world. There's also Google Buzz. But also to say it's legitimate and it's not going away, we're not just going to tear it down the next day. Twitter has, as you know, a massive following and a massive amount of people. They also do integration very well. You can integrate Twitter with everything. I've seen people put it on their toilets every time they flush the toilet at tweets. So you can kind of make it into whatever you want. But only into Ping gives Ping some validity, pushes the social networking, and also shows how well Twitter will play with others. What do you think?

Justin Edelstein: I don't use Ping. So I like the idea of it. I like the idea of my actions that I take in this place can show up in this place. So for that reason, I like what I'm hearing.

Jason Atwood: Do you connect your Facebook and your Twitter? No. Do you connect your Foursquare and your Facebook? No. Do you connect your Foursquare and your Twitter? No. Wow. I don't.

Justin Edelstein: I use social networking in a different way. I like the idea of this one so that they're all connected, but I use these things for different reasons. Facebook is my personal thing over here. I have a Twitter account that's more for professional persona. I have a couple other Twitter accounts that are for other reasons. I wouldn't even know which one to connect to which one. And Foursquare I kind of do just to know what it is and so I'm like up with the times. I don't feel like I need to be up with the times on Ping just yet. I don't really buy that much stuff in iTunes even to make it that worthy for me. And I don't even, I don't know, I just don't feel like that's necessary. iTunes is like slow enough on my computer. I don't need it to make it slower by having it load in all this other stuff.

10:42 Jason Atwood: Yeah, you would just send out a message to Twitter. I tell you what I like the way when connections are done and I wish every one of the places would do this. Okay, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Justin Edelstein: That one I actually do have connected.

Jason Atwood: The reason I like that one and the Foursquare one is that you have a choice when you're about to do it. Actually it's an option within LinkedIn. You can say if I put the in tag or not, like show it in my status on Twitter or on LinkedIn, I like that you have the option Foursquare whenever I check into place, we were just at a client and I checked into their place, I can say share that on Twitter, share that on Facebook. So I have the choice at the time I'm doing it. I want that to be always the case. If I want to connect them, let me connect them up, but I don't want it to be automatic because I don't like when there's too much activity on Facebook because it overrides Facebook. Twitter is much more active, so you can post 10, 15 times a day. You post 10, 15 times a day to Facebook and people look at you weird. Sorry for all those who do that. You know what I'm saying? There's a different ... If I had the more choice, I'd love to be able to post to Twitter once in a while and have it go to Facebook, but I want that choice when I'm tweeting. I want to say, oh this tweet I want to also add to Facebook as opposed to every time.

Jason Atwood: Does that make sense?

Justin Edelstein: It does make sense.

Jason Atwood: That's my social persona. Next up. Thanks for sharing. You're welcome. I just tweeted it and pinged it and Facebooked it. Next up, Salesforce. This is an interesting article coming out of PC World saying that Salesforce is not moving beyond CRM. CRM. It's so weird. What an odd statement. I think it's one of those headlines that you're supposed to read and go, oh, let me go read this article. Because I read the article thinking, wow, it worked then. It was absolutely successful because I read it and I thought, oh, what? What does that mean? What are they doing? It basically goes over saying that Salesforce wants to become the market leader in CRM and is not really interested in a lot of these other markets. But it's almost completely false to what's actually happening. Salesforce is moving into lots of different markets, including their connection with VMware, including their buying of Jigsaw, including their buying of things like ideas and knowledge that are completely not really about CRM. Ideas isn't really about CRM at all. It's more about social networking and it's more about idea management than it is about CRM. Yeah. So...

Justin Edelstein: Content could be included in that. I mean, while these things have hooks into CRMs, it makes it sound like, no, we are not a platform. We are a CRM application, when indeed they are a platform and not, I mean, they are a CRM application built on a platform. When the headline at least says that they will not move beyond this application, which they already have done. Right.

13:43 Jason Atwood: They've actually moved into one of their biggest pushes in the last year, year and a half has been the sales cloud, which is again, a lot of people consider that not CRM at all, talking about tickets and solutions and things like that. I find it interesting that this is coming out right before Dreamforce. It almost is like a head fake. I feel like this is a, we're not going to do anything beyond CRM and whoop, come in Dreamforce, they're going to say something else.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but why would they throw a big executive's name out there in this article? Polly. Polly Sumner. I've met Polly. Good for you.

Jason Atwood: She's very nice. We haven't even scratched the surface of the potential CRM market. That's kind of not even true, but okay.

Justin Edelstein: We've talked about it internally and decided not to. Right. Meaning moving beyond CRM and talking about financial apps or human resources apps, but.

Jason Atwood: Which is interesting because they have made a, A, they purchased or invested in those companies. They invested in Financial Force, which used to be Coda, which is a full-on, I would say medium-sized accounting software. I'm just trying to compare it to Microsoft Great Plains or something. It's probably in the Great Plains, but it's more than something like QuickBooks. And then they have great partnerships with someone we're involved with, Job Science, which is doing recruiting and onboarding. So I think to say that they're not getting in these platforms, it's like maybe that means that they're not going to do it themselves. I guess you're going to blow down the article, which it doesn't really get into, but it says Salesforce itself isn't going to get into these platforms and become an HR system or become an accounting system, but they'll let the other vendors do it on their platform. And to that I could say, I get it. But the way it sort of came across as an article, I didn't really, it doesn't come across right.

Jason Atwood: And so John Riberio of IDG News, shame on you. Last article, actually you posted so why don't you-

Justin Edelstein: I did, I put this on the agenda. Yes you did. It's an article from ReadWriteCloud.

Jason Atwood: They actually have a nice little- I like ReadWriteCloud.

Justin Edelstein: It's a nice little piece of the ReadWriteWeb family. Yep. Who are they owned by? I don't know. Do you get bought by somebody? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I've been reading ReadWriteWeb for years and ReadWriteCloud has sprung up and I enjoy their stuff as well. They have an article about Google Voice coming to Google Apps subscribers. It's kind of an update that was just posted the other day. So Google Apps has for the last five or six months been slowly rolling a couple of the other pieces of the Google account platform into their application suite, right? Well, yes.

Jason Atwood: I think you can give you a little history on this.

16:44 Justin Edelstein: Why don't you give me some history then if you're going to shake your head out?

Jason Atwood: I'm going to give you some history. So back in... So the way Google Apps has always been is that your Google Apps account and your single sign-on Gmail account, your Gmail account could get you into analytics, could get you into AdWords, could get you into Gmail, could get you into Docs. That's your Google account. Your Google account. Your Google Apps account could never connect those things. Right. That's what I just said. But starting six months ago, they started to migrate them together. That's what I just said. Well, okay, I didn't think you said it that way. But that's what I just said. And it was an opt-in program, of which we opted in back in May. We've been testing it forever.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, you can now use... I mean, they're different accounts. They're essentially different accounts. You have your Gmail personal Google account with your Google Reader and your Picasa and all your other fun Google toys. And then you have your professional Google Apps account, where you have your Gmail, your Calendar, your Docs, and now Google Reader and Analytics and Picasa, YouTube, et cetera. Google Wave. Google Wave, which we are fans of and have now mentioned on the podcast.

Jason Atwood: We're going to do it every time until they save it.

Justin Edelstein: So essentially Google is now slowly but surely rolling Google Voice into the Google Apps product line. So with your Google Apps username and password, you'll be able to use the Google Voice product, which essentially means for small businesses you can sort of forgo the purchase of telephony service. If you're using Google Apps for your email and for your calendar and docs and whatever else, you can use Google Voice too, which is pretty interesting. They're coming around and really trying to take over the entire communication and collaboration space.

Jason Atwood: Google Voice needs one piece to make it for small business. It needs call attendance. It needs to have the ability to have you call into one place and have routing of numbers and sort of say press this, press that. If they do that, they'll take on Talk to Me, they'll take on One Voice, they'll take on Grasshopper, they'll take on all these others. Right now it's a very singular person to person thing. It's a great product. I think the actual, the hidden secret to Google Voice is use Chrome, Google Chrome, install the Google Voice plugin, log into your Salesforce instance. Every phone number in Salesforce is clickable, click to dial. You basically get CTI built in. What's nice about the Google Voice thing is you can associate a number. So you can associate a different number, let's say your home phone number. Most people associate their mobile number. You can associate your home phone number and your work number and your aunt's number. And when you click on, using the Google Voice plug-in, when you click on it, you can say, so I could see, let's say, your number in Salesforce, I can click on it and say call Justin at his cell phone number, 555.1212, but then connect it to my work number. It then calls you on your cell, shows up as my Google Voice number, but then connects me on my landline. Basically allows me to connect to you anywhere without being from that number. It's a really nice feature. And since it's in Salesforce, where you have all these numbers, it's literally click to dial and then clicked to dial anywhere. Click to dial onto my cell, click to dial onto my work, click to dial me at home and then dial you. It's pretty cool. Have you tried that?

20:28 Justin Edelstein: I have tried it. And it didn't work? I'm not a huge Google Voice user because it wasn't connected to where I wanted it to be connected to. So now you'll use it? Yeah. available, I'll want to use it for my work account. This whole thing here. This whole thing that we're doing.

Jason Atwood: The other thing is that I've done it a couple times. The quality, because it is internet, it basically connects through Google. And for some reason, the quality of the call is then capped by Google. Does that make sense? So I've done it, and it just sounds like, even though I'm doing landline to landline with Google in the middle, sounds like I'm calling through, you know, an iPhone in our office to another iPhone in our office. iPhones in our office? Not so good. Yeah, yeah, we have really bad reception.

Justin Edelstein: Go figure. I bet 98% of the people on this, listening to this podcast, have bad

Jason Atwood: iPhone reception. And it's literally, there's like a spot in the office you can put your phone and it has pay reception. I got a text message from you an hour and a half after you sent it. But you were in it, you were downtown. I know.

Justin Edelstein: I know. I had to leave the office, get on a subway train, and go halfway across town, come up, and then I got the text message.

Jason Atwood: You know what you don't have to leave to get? What? The Cloud Focus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: Rolls right off the tongue.

Jason Atwood: So let's go. Let's get your Cloud Focus app pick of the week, just for those joining the podcast for the first time. Thank you. Welcome. Every week we pick applications. Mostly cloud applications, sometimes not. Let me tell you how much they cost, where to get them, and why we like them. So that's the Cloud Focus App Pick of the Week and Justin will start us off with his Cloud Focus App Pick of the Week.

Justin Edelstein: Justin I'm going to go back to my friends at force.com labs. I love these guys.

Jason Atwood: Gary Back to your friends? Have you left them?

Justin Edelstein: Justin I've left them.

Jason Atwood: Gary I think 50% of all your picks.

Justin Edelstein: Justin They crank out products at an amazing pace and they put one out today, the 11th of November, that was an idea of mine on the ideas that of mine on the ideas exchange. So this isn't just a pic of an app. This is a

Jason Atwood: pic... This is pimping my own brain. This is a pic of an app that then is also patting your

Justin Edelstein: back. Yeah. Okay good. Now granted it's not built on the platform yet meaning it's not part of Salesforce.com's offering. It's a labs product. Right. If you want to go vote for my idea before I tell you about the product, search the Salesforce ideas exchange for Twitter DM and you'll find it.

Jason Atwood: I was just about to say, there's one of the things that suffers from the the AppExchange listing, not AppExchange listing but ideas listing is, there's no URLs. You can't get enough of an URL.

Justin Edelstein: No, it's and ID equal. Essentially what they've built here and it's called force.com private messages. They've built with the chatter ability. What's chatter? Oh, people who are listening. No, no, what's Chatter? No, it's Chatter. So Salesforce Chatter, the social network built on top of the Salesforce platform built right inside of it. The ability to share statuses and the like with your coworkers. Excellent. What I was looking for was the ability to send a private message to somebody. Because when you chat or chatter something, anyone who's following you can see it a lot. Kind of like Twitter, right? it's public, but Twitter has direct messaging. You can say, hey Jason, I want to send you something, not very useful, it's 140 character email, awesome, but still it's a private connection when we're following each other that I can send you and you can send me. So I was looking for that out of

24:19 Justin Edelstein: Chatter because I wanted the ability to send someone something in private but I I wanted to use Chatter, I didn't want to use email, I wanted to stay inside of Salesforce. So they built it. It's called force.com private messages, it has an inbox, it has a sent box. You can send Chatter messages directly to somebody and they show up in a tab within Salesforce called private messages and you can filter on them and sort on them and reply to them and add people to them so you can have six or seven people within the private message and it's pretty interesting and it's free.

Jason Atwood: I'm going to sidetrack for a second. Please. Because I just had a thought, I had a reoccurring thought from before which is that, remember when we talked about email and social networking and email? So I'm pre-thinking here but Facebook has announced that they're doing something. They're doing some, you know, they're doing one of these Apple things where they're going to announce some big product and in it they talk about inbox. It made me think, oh my goodness, Facebook is going to create their own email client.

Justin Edelstein: They already have their own email client. They don't have their own email client.

Jason Atwood: They have the ability to do what you're talking about, which is DM people and whatever inside of Facebook. I'm talking external and an email client. That is Facebook email client. There's this basically message board stuff. Have you ever been on a message board? You can send private messages back and forth. It's really ... I have email. But it's not email.

Justin Edelstein: email like it's AOL.com 1996 email.

Jason Atwood: Exactly. But imagine if Facebook created an email client that's actually email email but then all does it in Facebook. So you can do both Facebook messaging but also email. That was almost exactly what we're talking about. We talked about why don't people take the email clients we have and put in more social. What happens if a social network built real email client? Then maybe you could build in other email into. Or you could include your iMap account. You're crazy. What's your cloud focus app pick of the week? Craziness by me for free. So by the way, what's the cost of your... I said it's free. Zero Justins. Zero Justins. So mine is not free. It used to be free. Not free anymore. It should be free. It's something about me. It's actually about me being very mobile. So it's Mobile Me by Apple. For those of you who don't know what that is, it used to be called iDisk. It is now basically a full suite of things. You pay $99 as an individual, although you can get it on Amazon for much less. You buy the box version for like $69. $149 for family, which you have to have up to five users. It basically gives you a suite of things that you can basically get anywhere else for almost free. But they're all built together and they actually work really well. You get an email, email client that you can use offline and online. You can only get storage, online storage, so you can have people send into, you can post your things. It integrates with iPhoto and all these other suite of apps, calendaring, address book, two features that I'd like to highlight that I think are really awesome. Both have to do with the iPhone and sort of the iSuite of things, the iPad, iTouch, iPhone. I do, which is, one is syncing. So if you have a MobileMe account, you can have your calendar and your contacts sync wirelessly and through push through any devices you have,

27:51 Jason Atwood: which is really great. It acts like a Blackbird. You add a person in your address book on your phone, it shows up almost instantly online, then shows up instantly on your Mac or multiple Macs. It's pretty cool. That's one feature that's really nice and almost that, that's almost worth the $99 a month.

Justin Edelstein: Almost.

Jason Atwood: You don't pay for yours so don't talk about it.

Justin Edelstein: That's true, I'm part of a friend and family package.

Jason Atwood: Yes you are, less friend, more family, wait, more family, less friend. So the second one is find my iPhone. So if you're in a household with more than one iPhone or you lose your iPhone a lot, you can go, you can log in online and say, find my iPhone and it basically will send a message and a sound to your phone and make it beep and say a message until you can go find it. You can also track where it is. So if you have multiple accounts like a kid on your account you can go and say, oh look, Sally's at the mall with Bob, my two kids, Sally and Bob. So really cool features. Those two alone I think are worth the 99 bucks. And again, you can get it through Amazon for about $110 for the family edition. You put five people on it, then you're like literally talking $20 a person for a year, that's not bad at all, I don't think. Fair enough.

Justin Edelstein: I find that it's great in theory, but syncing is hard. And I end up with about 10 contacts in my iPhone that are all the same person, with like some of them have 16 phone numbers, some have just their birthday. Like it really messes up the syncing when you have an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, and a desktop all syncing.

Jason Atwood: I've never had a problem with that. Oh my god, it's so bad. I'm going to show it to you.

Justin Edelstein: I have my phone right here in front of me. And I'll just scroll through my contacts, and for those following along at home, this has got to be great for you.

Jason Atwood: So thanks for doing it.

Justin Edelstein: I'm going to flow through my contacts, and oh wow, look at all of those. Look at what's in these.

Jason Atwood: Alright, so here's one tip for you at home.

Justin Edelstein: It's terrible, they're all the same.

Jason Atwood: I see, it's a lot of people. So on your Mac, on the address book, you can select a bunch of same people and say merge, there's a command, merge people, and it will merge them into one.

Justin Edelstein: I've done this once before, and then it just re-syncs. It's terrible. I'm not going to poo on the MobileMe parade. It's a nice product for what it is, nice email, nice calendar syncing, but I got to be honest, it does do some duplicative stuff for you.

Jason Atwood: I think one of your friends might just drop you from his, get back one of his accounts, so because you don't appreciate it. Anyway, that's the end of Cloud Focus Weekly. For this week, as always, follow us on blog.arkasync.com, which is both the podcast we publish there and we publish our blog posts there about once a week, so you can follow that. Twitter. Twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. Twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. Twitter.com slash Justin Edelstein. We tweet things we're doing and interesting tidbits and things we find during the week. Facebook. Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. We're not on ping yet, but we might. But when you're in iTunes, search for Cloud Focus Weekly. Subscribe to us because like tonight we're publishing this a little late on a Thursday. You might think we're not, but if you're subscribed by iTunes, it comes right down to you whenever we publish. And And while you're there, please leave us a nice review. We'd love some more reviews on the podcast in iTunes. That would be great. So again, thanks for joining us on Cloud Focus Weekly. And until next week, see you in the clouds.