Chatter Gets Plussed - Episode #66 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. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 66th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last week of October 2011. Except so it's titled chatter gets plussed Confluence weekly sponsored by Arca's your cognitive experts and I'm your host Jason at with joining me With the 66th time in a row a new record This co-host of podcasts for now just announcing Justin. How you doing? I go now jobs and you know we've done and I do that almost every week and every week you'll give me right now for now look a new record you gotta keep Keep on your game.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not getting any of you. When you say chatter gets plus, I wonder what you mean. Do you mean new features in chatter? Do you mean something else? I wonder what you mean. Well, let's talk about our agenda and. Then we'll get right into it. Let's get right into it. Alright, so,

Jason Atwood: Well, this is Google Apps. Google Plus is now available for apps. Google Plus competitive chatter Chatter gets plus. Oh. Oh. I have a blog post blog post about Chatter, so that kind of worked that in. So Google Plus, Chatter. And then we're going to talk about Dropbox for Teams and Twitter ads from celebrities. Yeah. Interesting. Google Plus we're going to talk about Google for the competitor to Facebook and Twitter provided by Google is now available for apps and the reason I say this at Chatter gets plus is because it's sort of as a enterprise customer or someone who uses Google apps in the enterprise- enterprise using email and calendaring contacts and docs and all that you weren't able to use the Google Plus feature Google has the concept of statuses and updates and feeds and following and profiles.

Jason Atwood: All of the sort of things that chatter does. In fact, if you were then to say, well, I'm you working in Google Docs, I'm working in Google Sheets, I'm working in Google Keynote or Google Slides, what the heck they call that one.

Justin Edelstein: And then I have this social-profile I wish it would have came out at the same time. There are two Justin Edelstein's floating around in Google Plus. That is one too many. like when it comes to some of these on all like chatter or or or some of the

03:35 Jason Atwood: Is is is is is is is is,,

Justin Edelstein: ..... I.

Jason Atwood: Personal ones gone. I get it. I think my personal one might change to something else. My personal one's changing to no one can find this unless you're in my circles. Yeah. And again, I wasn't a big user of Google Plus anyway. I kept trying and I kept going back to it. I never...

Justin Edelstein: I don and go to reader anymore because the stories of the story just like retell a little,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

06:39 Jason Atwood: On a scale one huge huge threat being

Justin Edelstein: Absolutely A, I don't think that people in the beginning will trust its security model to completely just say this is what we're using internally for networking and because it's super easy to just throw someone from external into your circle. I don't know what you can do from the administrator your side because I haven't looked at it I've just signed

Jason Atwood: Up as a user You basically turn people on and once they're on they can do it.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so from the outside or have somebody from the outside grab you and be able to see things that you're doing. Two, I don't think it has the contextual juiciness that chatter has of being able to do things in context of the work that you're doing until they connect more of the Google Apps empire that it is right until until I could throw a dock out onto Google Plus and collaborate in that way until I can throw a sheet out there communities or walled communities.

Jason Atwood: Chatter is a walled community inside of. You can open it up. It's optional,

Justin Edelstein: But you can turn that option off for people.

Jason Atwood: You can say, open this up, invite whoever you want to chatter. I I cannot be sitting in my org and hit a, and go to post a post in, and then say, oh, and launch this to, and launch this to a public view the.

Justin Edelstein: , something, something like that. It was a big benchmark. It was David Giroir in a Giroir. So where Salesforce is at about 100,000 customers,

Jason Atwood: 15 million. You got to think that by doing this, by having this ability, and again, I think they could Let's build it into some of the tools that are already... I think right now it feels like a little bit, it's like my corporate account kind of like... Oh, here's an account that you kind of can use as an external view. Like Yammer.

09:52 Justin Edelstein: But Yammer didn't have an external view to it. It can get interesting if you thought about using Google. all in and you said my intranets built on start up a dock and then throw it out into plus and throw a circle around it

Jason Atwood: It already has real time, which is yet to come to Twitter, which is pretty cool. I just don't think people work that way. It already has sharing, much better sharing, because Google Docs has better sharing. I can share out to other people very quickly. I think they have a b lot of advantages. But anyway, you know, a kind of thing. So going into the next part, which is a good segue, as we have to say, is my new blog. I posted maybe minutes before this podcast, which is called Getting Lost and Found in Chatter. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. We were actually talking to some people at Salesforce who have something to do with Chatter. I'm not going to mention names.

Justin Edelstein: And they were asking sort of what? You can't mention names, but you can mention Twitter handles if you want. No, I'm not. Twitter plug.

Jason Atwood: Jason and Allie, Twitter plug. And we were basically saying, well, what's, you know, they were being asked the question, you guys are big chatter users, you help clients get up and use on chatter, I've helped clients move to using it as their intranet. What is the thing that, you know, what's missing from it? And I went into sort of a little spiel about, you know, productivity and email and inbox zero and basically that chatter, like, and this is the same thing as Twitter and Facebook, You know, but Twitter and Facebook are not productivity. I don't use Twitter and Facebook to get work done. I use them to, you know, see things, but I don't collaborate with people. I don't go in and say, I need an update on this project at Twitter, right? But chatter is meant for that.

Jason Atwood: Chatter is meant for productivity. Chatter is meant for work. And here's one of the things that you don't have. You don't have that, kind of, like, guaranteed delivery that you have in email. You don't have a read state. So, I basically word blog post saying... Okay, here's the problems. You don't have these things. Here's ways you can help fix it. Here's some best practices, things that we've learned from using it. Using mentions, using better sorting, you know, using groups. And then finally I said at the end if it's really urgent and it's really important, don't put it in chatter. And I we have that policy here. It's like don't use chatter for the thing. The world's gonna explode. Don't go put it in chatter. Use the communication device that's going to get you the fastest thing.

12:54 Jason Atwood: That's the phone and then the text and then the email Right, there's a there's a list and chatters down underneath email in terms of happy guessing So anyway, go to blog.argaecicicicicicicicicicicicicicic and read all about it. You're not gonna ask my opinion You don't care Sure, I care what I think about you. I want to hear all about you. Just don't you know I really do no I'm gonna edit back in wait hold on. I just ended up that last section now.

Justin Edelstein: I'm gonna say hey What do you think about the barber? Well, I think the most interesting thing that you write about is the whole read state and the sorting. So, you're right, if you go away for, I mean, in some words... that are large if you go away for a day but let's just say you know in an organization of 15 people and you go away for a week and you're heavy chatter users you are bound to miss something because there's gonna if you're heavy users there's a lot of communication happening within that within chatter and when you get back don't know what you missed. You don't know. I mean you can sort of say, you know, use the sort by post and comment date and then scroll all the way back to like the day you left.

Justin Edelstein: I mean that's kind of hard, right? It's not like email where you go in. You say, oh 89 unread messages and they're bold. And the ones that you haven't read are bold. And when you read them, they're not bold. And that's that right and that works across every device every email coin on the planet works. Yeah, so I mean it's web apps Any mobile right it works that way the caveat read it on one place

Jason Atwood: And it's right on another place the caveat

Justin Edelstein: Slightly where they might be getting there is the whole private messaging thing While it's not prevalent enough throughout the entire application, but in winter 12,- maybe before then, and we were in the pilot, I don't know, winter 12 I think, private messages were GA. And those have those things. Those do have read states. They do have like little notifications. They're slightly hidden. They're in the chatter tab. They're in a little corner.

Jason Atwood: They need to be- Slightly hidden is like saying- They. They're in one place. Like saying this country is slightly in debt. It's- Slightly. Slightly. Let's not get- political.

Justin Edelstein: But those messages have that state and that you know, red, unread, who's in it, how many do you have, things of that nature. But that's not chatter.

Jason Atwood: Right? Chatter is bigger, way bigger than that. That's a little... a portion of chat. But that means in order for chatter to go to the next level, to hit to I think a real productivity tool, it needs to have those things or at least ways around it. And again, I've heard people talk about well, in Twitter when you go in, I find it the biggest problem of Twitter too. It's like when I go into Twitter, unless I stay in Twitter all day long. Oh yeah, it's a fire hose. It's a it's a fire hose and you're basically drinking from it all the time. It's like well, you're not going to...

Justin Edelstein: And some clients, the mobile client, I mean it cuts it, and the desktop client just cuts. It's like, you know what, you've had this many messages over the last nine hours, you haven't looked at it, I'm just cutting it to the last hour. Forget it, you're missing those eight hours. You're not getting it.

15:59 Jason Atwood: And if those were important things, so again, one of the big things I say was use mentions, because mentions at least, A, they show up in different spots within the chat or applications, you can always go to an at me section. They also almost always sent out an email. I think that was sort of the thing that I was coming up So I was writing it was

Justin Edelstein: Chatter is a lot about user preference where email isn't a lot about user preference And we know users and they don't set preferences.

Jason Atwood: You don't go and say to me I will or will not receive emails you receive emails because you have an email address and that's your user preference This is like well, I can turn it on

Justin Edelstein: If I receive a mention if I don't if I receive something on comments after after something I've already commented on. So great granularity. Very good.

Jason Atwood: But most users don't even look at it. They don't even know it's there. Or they don't understand. And I've heard this from a lot of users. They don't understand why I will or will not get awarded. What shows up in my feed? And you basically have to say, well, if you follow something, if you follow somebody, if you did that. So anyway, read the post. I think it's kind of interesting. You know, I get something I've been thinking about for a while and my turn came up, so we went for it. All right, so two more things. Let's talk about a small thing about Dropbox. We've talked about Dropbox before. I think we've picked it. They've now launched a Teams edition, which is basically their ability to say, hey, listen, you like Dropbox and you want to put all your files there.

Jason Atwood: We use something similar, which we've talked about. We use Jungle Disk, which is a competitor, I guess. It's owned by Rackspace, it's hosted in Rackspace Files, and basically you have a drive on your desktop that is a virtual drive, but then it's shared. So whenever you go into it, whatever's in there, everybody can see, you can see that drive, whatever. But it's great, because you can work from anywhere. So this is the same, except for this actually syncs now. And I think it's really cool. Like I went and I read about it. It basically does the things that I like. They have a great client, as we know. They have a great iPhone app. They have a great...

Justin Edelstein: You Tell me why this is different than having a Dropbox account and just having people in my folders that are shared Why is it different? Yeah, like right now I because I always have Dropbox accounts, right? And we don't see each other we don't see each other What do you mean?

Jason Atwood: We don't see each other? This would be we can set up ones that just by logging a Dropbox We would see certain

Justin Edelstein: Meaning you wouldn't have to share a folder with them. It's auto shared.

Jason Atwood: That's it? That's the difference. Well, and it's unlimited for everybody in the team. Unlimited data.

Justin Edelstein: So that's huge. One price for a team or one price per person?

Jason Atwood: So it's $7.95 per year per five people. $135 per year. Yeah, it's not that much.

Justin Edelstein: My face was like, let's buy that and just play with it. Oh, you're not? No, I thought you were like, wait, that sounds like a lot. No, it really doesn't. It's $13 a month per person. It's like nothing. It's not bad.

Jason Atwood: I would tell you that that Rackspace's Jungle Disk, it's $16. It's like $4 per person.

Justin Edelstein: So that's a difference. No offline access, though. That's the big C here, right? No offline access. It doesn't sync. It syncs the data down. Whatever's up there is up there. This actually syncs the data down, yeah. Although you can sync in Jungle Disk. So is it sitting on my machine? Yeah, just like Dropbox's. You could do it. Gotcha.

19:08 Jason Atwood: So anyway, an interesting thing, I think more interesting is what came up about Dropbox started, the founders of it started talking about how they were approached by Apple and Apple was going to buy them.

Justin Edelstein: And Dropbox would be a much better version of the iDIS. Yeah, Merlin man, you exist all the time.

Jason Atwood: Rose makes you say this is by Dropbox. They tried in other words Apple tried they had corporate meetings They meant the founders they said they handed them a I mean a virtual check and they said I think it was you know You know top end of six digits and they were talking at six seven hundred million dollars and 900 million was total and I said no they didn't want to go.

Justin Edelstein: That's a lot more than six digits $900 million. That's like nine digits. Six, seven, eight zeros. You're wrong. Yeah, you are. I'm not wrong. I'm wrong. You're wrong. I'm wrong. You're wrong for $900,000. I don't know why they didn't take it. I don't know why you wouldn't take $900,000.

Jason Atwood: $900,000. $900,000. Oh, no. Yeah, nine digits. That's right. It was high nine digits. The decimals in there. It's 11. Apples. Apple came in, gave them a whole speech, they talked about funding, they talked about, you know, it's better to be owned by us, better we will, you know, and, but basically they didn't do it, which is interesting. I'm not, we'll see in the end, like,

Justin Edelstein: In the end, what will probably be a bad choice. Probably, because Apple can,

Jason Atwood: Apple said, we're going into this space, and they did with iCloud, they're gonna continue, that's just their first salvoi, they're gonna continue, my guesses are gonna be pretty pretty. of of other people are anxious. space to. So, but interesting Dropbox going for the more because when we look to jungle this they didn't have this sort of floating around they had something. Like a shared one but just didn't work as much. So this is very good offering. So last story before we get on our CloudFocus after the week. Is Twitter ads from celebs?

Justin Edelstein: D d d d d d d d d to his assistant named Joanne, we know because we have screenshots of the tweets, saying, tell at del-del-Taco I will accept $12,000 to plug their S-word food. See how I did that? S-word. Yeah, it's good. Thanks, Rain. And he meant to do that as a private message. Did you really spell his name with? I guess so. Side note, that's crappy. Yeah, well, he, not his choice. It's at Rainn Wilson Twitter blog. Right. So anyway So anyway, anyway, he the had to put out a tweet a couple minutes later. Please disregard last tweet. Was the private text to my assistant. What was it? I don't know. I, but then a couple minutes later. Or so it was even. timeline he writes loving the new at del taco macho bell And secondly, that there could be such a snafu.

23:17 Justin Edelstein: And I feel like this is going to cause a little bit of a backlash around this type of advertising. Because it really cuts through the... I mean, it's not really very transparent. Anyway, like in the first place, sometimes these things could be genuine, but you know, you might really love a Big Mac, right? And you're right, I'm eating a Big Mac, I this kind of marketing that It's probably unnecessary.

Jason Atwood: And it, it's the same, it's a little bit the same that's been following. You know, you and I both read way too many Twitter books, or books on Twitter, And one of the things I talk about is when you're doing a corporate Twitter account or a professional Twitter account, what is your message of a person or a thing? So some companies they take their corporate Twitter account and their It's a the. you will say thank you. endorsements all the time, we feel like I think, you know, what consumers like to think and as a consumer as well, I like to think I know when someone's sitting in front of a, McDonald's, with a camera, and goes, I love McDonald's. I know that difference between.

26:22 Justin Edelstein: If you're gonna sell out, then the reason I followed your Twitter accounts is because you're, and a that a the a- I and the-,, of, R and!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I I, the and th what the ramifications of I think there's no problem. The advertisers,

Jason Atwood: Listen. There's no thinking things through. They will just, they will, they will paint logos on the moon eventually. It'll happen. It's just a matter of whether someone lets them do it. Right? It's, advertisers will do anything. The reality is. When I went to college, and way out, they used to say, you saw the ad, the thing that stuck with me for the amount of years, is that you saw 500 Hads a day, you remembered 12, you liked 6. So the 500, so that's from ads and magazines and paper and billboard.

Justin Edelstein: That number now is wrong. I can walk out of my office,

Jason Atwood: I see 500 in one second and so I places to advertise, it's getting crazy. I mean, you watch, I love it on TV where you're watching a TV show and there's like, we watch football, I watch a lot of football. And it's like the halftime report, this down, this first down brought to you by Pepsi.

Justin Edelstein: Well, the worst is actually, we're going off on a little bit of a tangent. but the worst if you really want to hear some obnoxious, obnoxious, is listening to a Yankee game on the radio, because seemingly every single thing that happens in the game is sponsored by somebody. Something, yes. The Fifteenth. Out is sponsored by GEICO, which can save you time. fifteen minutes can save you whatever. The Verizon call to the bullpen, the this, this, the that, that, the third inning, the first out, like the first run, like everything. It's almost annoying to listen to. Well, it is annoying to listen to. But the problem is with DVR,

Jason Atwood: With all the choices we have in making, making, you know, to looking at stuff, anymore, and. I'm looking at a web page I'm seeing.

Justin Edelstein: We can turn ads off on web pages now. Use that little reader button. Yeah, I mean there's a content. It's true. The ad's off. It's true. So advertisers are always gonna look for something different. This is a foray into the social Advertising space as opposed to paying Twitter. They're paying the person who's using Twitter as a vehicle. We'll see how that goes with Twitter down the line. If I'm Twitter, I'd like that. I am peeved at this. I'm like, you are using my platform to pay people $12,000. Where's my cut? Yeah, I want my cut. Because you know what? You do that again, you're off. You're done. No, you're done. How does Twitter get a little scratch off of it? They need to, and they're starting to do ads, ads are coming up in the building.

30:04 Justin Edelstein: Sure, you could sponsor a tweet, you could sponsor a topic and get a tweet to the top of a trending topic. You could, you know, topic writing, whatever, but are, are they interested to see how they'll figure this out? Yeah, I totally. Alright, so, speaking of... So speaking of corporate plugs,

Jason Atwood: Let's make some code folks. I picked the weeks we've never been paid to make any of these picks. That's right.

Justin Edelstein: 65 times I've never been paid. Never been paid. I'm picking a free app on the AppExchange which came out this week or just last week. Post-up on labs? No. This is from Cloud for Good Good. Fellow Salesforce MVP, Tal Frankfurt, who is behind Cloud for Good. Cloud for Good basically does a lot of now-profit consulting and they put an app out on the split and this is really So for anyone who's worked with a development team or a fundraising team at a not-for-profit or, or has done any consulting work and put together a fundraising system, oftentimes not-for-profits have multiple programs that they're funding through their donors. And donors give money and they say, you can use it for this reason. Most of the time you want unrestricted because then you can use it for whatever you want.

Justin Edelstein: But sometimes times. people have interests in specific programs... and I want you to use $250,000 of it for this program in this year and I want you to use $250,000 of it for that same program in the net And you have to build out a model to sort of capture that. And what Cloud for Good has done here is put that together, or at least it would seem that way. I haven't actually installed it or used it yet, but it's intriguing enough for me. Par for the course. Par for the course, but it's intriguing enough for me to look at and say, wow. out. Cloud for Good has done a lot of the work here for me, where I don't have to build out these allocation or splits or designation records, and they've put a nice little, what looks like a visual force UI to split it out nice and easy.

Justin Edelstein: And it looks like they've even used some Google charting APIs to bring back some visualizations of where the where these dollars are being used, what year, how much, etc. So donation split. Next time I have a not-for-profit development project, I will be installing this to play around with it and see if it works for them. Awesome. Yeah, free. I did on the AppExchange. I like free. Free.

33:33 Jason Atwood: And the Salesforce pick. I aint got one. I actually went to see if I'd I picked this before. I feel like I have or I've talked about it, but since this this is sort of this is a of update to something that's out there and it just came out, I feel like I can I'll make it work, which is I've talked about using soft, you know, financial I use Quicken and QuickBooks, they've been tweeted about trying to find a Quicken replacement. But one of the things that was a replacement until Int I bought it was something called Mint. Mint is an online application, it still is an online application where you go in and you put in all your, you know, using your password for all your different financial sites, and it goes and it pulls in all the data and then automatically categorizes it all together.

Jason Atwood: So, it'll say, you'll see restaurants and put them into restaurant spending and whatever. It does a lot of stuff automatically. I'm a user. Yes, you are. And so there's two things that I think that it's not been able to do in the past, and One is a new feature they added and the other is sort of an update. You can now put in things in the future. and then you give that check to somebody, you go to your bank account, the next day, the bank account still says $1,000. Well, it doesn't, you don't have $1,000, The time's at times 30, 40 checks in a complex financial situation. So mint never was that. It's always to add in transactions that haven't app, it's got some Okay, you can drag and drop the dates of date ranges you want to look at stuff.

Jason Atwood: It's a really nice tool for the iPad it does have a security code so you can obviously protect it But the mint for the iOS to universal app now works on the iPhone and the I know my goodness

Justin Edelstein: I just checked my email and I literally just got an email from mint two minutes ago announcing mint for iPad

Jason Atwood: I'm glad you're paying attention to me while I was making my pick that is sick wait what?

Justin Edelstein: No I I just came in look at that I got the mint announcing mint for iPad as you were talking about it alright well that's serendipitous maybe is that a word? no..

Jason Atwood: It is so that's it does the crowd focus at picks of the week? If, if you have CloudFocus app picks and you want us to look at something, you know, hit us up on Twitter. I think I'll discuss, which is pretty see all over the place. You can comment on our blog. I actually saw you got another comment the other day on your permission sets. Blog post. So another one, like a little today. Oh, another one? Yeah, another one. There's so many. I can't even keep it up. There you go. And so go to blog.arcasync.com. You'll see all the lists. And you can drill in and then comment from there. Of course, we're on Facebook, slash M. Hopefully, we'll be on Google Plus soon if they announce that. And in iTunes for the podcast to win, subscribe, leave a review, because we change up our days.

37:25 Jason Atwood: We're doing, on Thursday, which is sort of our normal slot, but we do change it up. We try Thursday. Sometimes, sometimes Tuesdays. And leave a review. We just love that. So then, until next week, we'll be back probably on Thursday. We'll try again. Until that time, enjoy those crowded days. 🎵