Gone to Eleven - Episode #37 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.

00:09 Jason Atwood: This is the 37th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the fourth week of March 2011. This episode is titled Gone to Eleven. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I am your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me, special guest today and for the last 37 times, is my co-host and partner in crime here at Arkus, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today? I thought you were going to say someone else for a second there. No, I'm not. I was not going to say that.

Justin Edelstein: And everyone was getting excited.

Jason Atwood: Everybody was listening was probably getting excited. Speaking of getting excited, we have a great agenda today. We're going to talk about a new blog post. Do that every single time. New blog post that we did this week. Actually, Larry the Unmentionable did it. We'll talk about what he had to say. And then we have a couple pieces of Google News. Google does discussions and speech to text in Chrome 11. Interesting stuff. Amazon Android app store and the legal fallout of that. And then we have some LinkedIn news. LinkedIn passing 100 million members.

Justin Edelstein: We very rarely talk about LinkedIn. We always leave them behind.

Jason Atwood: They're up and coming. 100 million's a big number to hit. And then we'll make our CloudFolks app pick of the weeks. I predict that you pick something from force.com apps. Your prediction's wrong. OK. So let's kick it off with Larry's blog post. Let's do that. Entitled March Madness and the Downfall of Netflix.

Justin Edelstein: That's quite a title. Got a lot of things going on.

Jason Atwood: It is a lot of things. How could March Madness and the Downfall of Netflix be connected? You tell me. So the podcast, sorry, the podcast, I do this. The blog post.

Justin Edelstein: This is a mental thing for you. It is.

Jason Atwood: It's a mental block. It's a search and replace string that just keeps happening. It's a text expander.

Justin Edelstein: LEROY DANLINGER-JOHNSON That was rather geeky. Really.

Jason Atwood: At this point, you're going to call me geeky. The blog post was about Larry's experience watching the NCAA March Madness, which is in March, which is now, which we were actually watching at a local establishment on the iPad. And that now, how-

Justin Edelstein: We were watching it on the televisions and also on an iPad. iPad.

Jason Atwood: Because we were special. Streaming over local Wi-Fi. And basically how we're getting there in terms of streaming live sports events, which has always sort of been the thing that live TV. And again, we talk about this is becoming a big topic this year. I think it was one of my predictions for 2011, which is that there's going to be major roads into this. We've talked about Hulu. We've talked about Netflix streaming. We've talked about Apple TV adding MLB.

Justin Edelstein: We love streaming. so we just talk about it all the time.

Jason Atwood: We do, because it's all sort of from the cloud.

Justin Edelstein: We're just trying to make your prediction come true. I am. By talking about it as much as we can.

Jason Atwood: By talking about it enough, maybe it will come true. So, you know, talking about, he talked about streaming the NCAA double A.

03:14 Justin Edelstein: Using my pick of the week from last week with the NCAA on demand, which is great.

Jason Atwood: Still out there, still reused, because they're still going into.

Justin Edelstein: So now I'm on all those games tonight. Yep. Four games tonight.

Jason Atwood: And also about Netflix, the downfall of Netflix. There's a couple, two big news things about Netflix. One is that they had some service outages for the last couple days.

Justin Edelstein: I noticed that when I went to hit Netflix on demand, or Netflix streaming via my Apple TV, couple nights ago.

Jason Atwood: Yep, it cracked out.

Justin Edelstein: It just was like, service can't be reached. I was like, oh, that's sort of lame when I go and I wanna watch something.

Jason Atwood: So they had a big outage last Saturday night.

Justin Edelstein: That might have been exactly what it was.

Jason Atwood: And then they had an outage Wednesday night, And then I had an outage, sorry, Tuesday night and Wednesday night. So a little side story. I tweeted this, so I'll do a side story. And then if anybody wants to go read the blog posts, it will be up as soon as this podcast is up at blog.arkasinc.com. But let me tell you a side story. So I actually am one of those guys, maybe a little geeky. But I gave a call up to Netflix and wanted to talk to somebody. I actually went on their website, and I was going to put in a ticket. Basically a suggestion. like, hey guys, you're having these issues, these outage issues. I have a few suggestions. As someone who's been in this business for a long time, meaning computing and websites and cloud computing and all that for a while, and now helps people leverage the cloud, I have a few tips for you guys. And so I called up and I'll tell you in the first round, very friendly people, but when I started asking questions, what happened, how long are you down for, what, you know, no answer, couldn't, It's all proprietary information.

Jason Atwood: So then I started going down the path of saying, oh, really, well, I think maybe a best practice would be, why don't you look at some of the other vendors who are scaling and doing cloud services, and that they're providing updates via the web, meaning I can log into trust.salesforce.com, Google Apps dashboard, and Mobile Me dashboard, and see any service interruptions. I was like, you should probably integrate that into your process. So I got in this big discussion. I then got transferred to a manager and had the discussion again.

Justin Edelstein: They just were like, thank you, customer guy. Well, no. Quick. They weren't. And I'll tell you why. A couple reasons.

Jason Atwood: One is I've been a customer since March, 2001. So I've actually been a customer. You've got some street cred. I've got some street cred. 10 years of Netflix gives me some street cred. You built Netflix. Kind of. I did quick math, and I said, I've probably given you thousands of dollars over my lifespan. The other thing was I was saying, this is what companies are doing. You don't have to give away your intellectual secrets, but you should allow your customers an ability to see what's going on with your service. It's called transparency. And so you need to provide that when you're charging people money for a service that is supposed to be 24x7, and it's not 24x7 because nothing is 24x7, three nines, whatever. You should have something. And I even said, here you do. You have service.netflix.com. You put it on another hosting provider. It's a simple page. It has red, yellow, green, and an update. and people like me or you, instead of running around your network at home or saying, is it my Apple TV or is it my iPad or is it my computer that's not working,

06:29 Jason Atwood: I can easily go there and then they'll tell me what I need to know. Anyway, I got in this long discussion and at the end of it I said, listen, I'm not here to beat you up for money or to tell you guys I'm not gonna use you or to threaten. I'm here because I'm a long time customer and I want you to succeed but this is some of the stuff that as a growing company, you can't go down for three hours and consider it something you don't even communicate to your clients. Like they didn't even communicate out until this morning that they were sorry they had an outage. Five days in this business is too long. So anyway, so we already goes on about that and about the future.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I'm back and I named it Netflix Downfall. And I think part of it was about the service interruptions and part of it was about all the other services that are popping up that just like this March Madness demand sparked it was like oh wow I can watch like a live event streaming this is phenomenal and we mentioned last week Time Warner coming out with their live version the sling box which exists I think another cable company perhaps it's Comcast is coming out with something like this and if Netflix streaming service is gonna keep up they're gonna have to do things a little bit differently and I know that they are actually they're going out and signing exclusive content agreements where they're gonna have sort of content that was created specifically for Netflix streaming you can't get anywhere else right so you can get like you know television shows that are on CBS or ABC or Showtime or whatever on Netflix but you can also get this original content David Fincher produced idea or show that's gonna be distributed exclusively through Netflix. So they're sort of creating their own cable channel almost if you think about it that way, which is an interesting way to go.

Jason Atwood: But they're also losing cable channels because Showtime is going to start taking back.

Justin Edelstein: Because they're pissed about that.

Jason Atwood: So I'm not sure that's the way I would go. I would think you'd want to have more content, not specialized content. Because I don't go to a place, very rarely do I go pay for a place just because I have one thing I want. I pay to a place because I have lots of stuff I want, not because because they have one thing. Like I use Hulu Plus now because they have stuff that no one else has.

Justin Edelstein: But you also pay for HBO.

Jason Atwood: No, I actually stopped paying for HBO and Showtime

Justin Edelstein: because they don't have the things I want. Good. Right.

Jason Atwood: So, I mean, but when they have things I want.

Justin Edelstein: But people do pay for things like HBO, like 12 bucks a month.

Jason Atwood: I was paying, yeah, something a little different.

Justin Edelstein: Right, so if you can get, if you can get, you know, original content that's as good or close to as good as, and maybe it'll take some time to get there, HBO productions like Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Boardwalk Empire or something like that. But plus all that other stuff that's more on demand. Everything's going on demand. So it'll be interesting to see how Netflix plays it out.

Jason Atwood: I think really Netflix should focus on not only the customer service stuff that I gave them suggestions, but I think they should also focus on more up-to-date stuff. So I go in now, and if I were Netflix, I would be fighting with Hulu, not fighting with Showtime. Because Hulu has the episodes that aired last night. And as a viewer, yes, I can catch up in Scrubs by watching it on Netflix, seasons one through seven. But I'm paying for Hulu because I can catch up on The Office and Parks and Rec, what happened last night. So that's the way I would go if I were on Netflix. But I know that's why they built Hulu. Who was the response to both Apple and Netflix? And YouTube. And YouTube.

10:13 Justin Edelstein: Because SNL skits were showing up on YouTube and made YouTube, right? Like all these, I think it was like Lazy Sunday was like the first YouTube video I think I ever saw. Someone sent me this link to this YouTube.

Jason Atwood: That's your first YouTube video?

Justin Edelstein: In 2004 or 2005 or something like that. And it was like, wow, this is pretty cool. Or 2006, whenever it was. Yeah, who knew this thing called YouTube existed? So it's interesting.

Jason Atwood: Well, two little pieces coming out of Google this week. And we talked last week, actually, about how they're shifting their release schedule. And so things are coming out. One is the Chrome. So we talked, actually, about Google Chrome going to 10. Well, they just released their beta of 11. I think the browser wars are back. I think so, too. I think we're getting it, because Firefox 4 is out there. They're claiming numbers that it had more downloads than internet and 20. Internet Explorer 9, Chrome... Times 2. Times 2, twice as much.

Justin Edelstein: Not only do we have more, but we literally crushed you.

Jason Atwood: I feel like Firefox is kind of in a losing battle at this point, because if you want the openness and you want the plug-ins, you've got Chrome. If you want the security and the person to stay with you, and as a big company behind it, not something open source, you have Safari. But it is ugly Firefox.

Justin Edelstein: Well, also, you have Safari that ships with an OS. You have IE that ships with an OS. And then if you want the extensibility, Google's pretty big time, so you go with the Google Chrome. You're right, unfortunately. But Firefox had a little bit of a head start beyond Chrome, so they still get. JONATHAN BERI RYAN I think they're not as

Jason Atwood: fast as any of them.

Justin Edelstein: JONATHAN BERI RYAN No, I haven't gotten the new one. JONATHAN BERI RYAN They're not faster than any other browser.

Jason Atwood: In fact, Chrome and Opera still beat everybody.

Justin Edelstein: JONATHAN BERI I'm a Safari guy. I use Safari on my Apple. That's what I use, and I use Chrome if I need two browsers. Chrome's my second. Firefox is installed, but I very rarely even use it. I have.

Jason Atwood: I use Safari for main, then Chrome for a ton. I love Chrome. And then Firefox, if I want to test, there's a couple of extensions, like some SEO stuff that's in Firefox. Anyway, Chrome 11 is coming out, the betas, or the public betas, and it's going to include speech to text. So speaking to your browser.

Justin Edelstein: And this is probably part of the Chrome moving from being a browser to being the OS, the platform. So that's an OS type feature, right? You think of having speech to text, that's like OS level stuff, to have it in a browser. I assume HTML5 somewhere?

Jason Atwood: Well, they all are doing HTML5 support. They all pass the acid test, which is the test that tests how much they do HTML5.

Justin Edelstein: And HTML5 speech input API.

Jason Atwood: Right. So it's cool. I'm not sure I'm talking to my browser yet, but maybe. What is this?

13:18 Justin Edelstein: Also making a first appearance in the beta is support for GPU accelerated 3D CSS. What does that mean?

Jason Atwood: I think that means the gaming that the CSS based, or HTML browser-based gaming will start to appear.

Justin Edelstein: 3D? 3D? Not like put on a pair of glasses and things pop out in my face, 3D. Pretty much. Wow.

Jason Atwood: Salesforce, in your face. You know what it'll make it really good? Chatter.

Justin Edelstein: Your boss pops out and yells at you via chatter.

Jason Atwood: A 3D?

Justin Edelstein: No, sell more.

Jason Atwood: A 3D Google Wave.

Justin Edelstein: Oh. Nice. All righty.

Jason Atwood: So another story out of Google this week, which was they now integrating, talking about Google Wave, which is actually, that's a Google Wave thing, they're putting discussions inside of their Google Apps, specifically Docs because...

Justin Edelstein: This has existed in Sheets for a long time.

Jason Atwood: It's not chat though, it's discussions and here's why, because you can close them out. You can have a discussion and then close out that discussion. So what's nice is it's not like a comment, it's like a back and forth. And they showed the video has some really cool like inviting people into it, very much like chatter and very much like Google Wave. So you can see where Google Wave, while we all lament the fact that it's dead, although we use it and no one's talked about when it's going to end, so I'm... It's never dying. It's never dying. It's evergreen. You know, this is a cool way of building in the technology into other...

Justin Edelstein: It also has at mentions with replies. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. Now I'm looking at it before I wasn't looking at it. Good job.

Jason Atwood: So is there anything on this agenda?

Justin Edelstein: my show research as the show's going up. Very good, because you're a broadcaster.

Jason Atwood: Wait, that's a different joke. So another story, which actually has two pieces, which is Amazon released the new Android App Store, and then was sued immediately by Apple for the App Store logo. I think this is interesting.

Justin Edelstein: Forgetting for a second that they're getting sued by Apple. Let's put that decide for a moment. Okay. I think it's interesting that a retail, I mean, e-tail? What do they call that? E-commerce? Sure. E-tail. Did I just make that up? Probably not. That they are like, we know how to sell things, okay? We know how to, we have all the accounts, we know how to process payments, we have recommendation engines, we have search engines that get you, you know, from place to place. Sorry, Sorry, that's our iPhone. We get calls in the middle of our podcast. Meanwhile, the guy leaves the room and doesn't take his phone with him.

Jason Atwood: I don't know why you keep talking. That is a part of broadcasting history.

Justin Edelstein: That's podcasting for you.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty. So keep going.

Justin Edelstein: Sorry, I was going. They know how to do stores.

16:21 Jason Atwood: They bought Zappos the other year, a couple years ago, so they're clearly expanding. They haven't doing an Android store though. I don't know. I think it's interesting. Didn't Android already have its own marketplace?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but it's, I, all right, let me, full disclosure, you don't have an Android phone. It doesn't sound like that phone. Never had an Android phone. Doesn't sound like the phone that just rang that was neither yours nor mine, and shall, the person shall be, remain nameless. All right. But you know, they know how to do this, and maybe they take on that aspect and make it easier for developers to pump their stuff into Amazon as opposed to the way that Google is doing it and it just gives them an alternative way to get their stuff out there.

Jason Atwood: An alternative marketplace on top of the marketplace?

Justin Edelstein: Well, maybe the Google marketplace isn't that good. Maybe it has bad browsing ability. Maybe it has bad, you know, the genius engine. Maybe it just stinks and Amazon knows how to do this stuff.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, hey listen, I love Amazon. I can use Amazon, I use Amazon for too much stuff. And we've talked about it before, I go through one cause, which is a way to raise money for school. So I raise money for school that my kid goes through and I literally buy everything from toilet paper to cases of coffee to, I mean, I buy everything, anything I can possibly get through Amazon Prime, I'm through Amazon, I love it. So I want them to succeed because I think that they have a great service. It's very fast, it's easy. You can also do subscriptions. What I love about that, like subscribe to dishwasher soap. Like I know I go through so much dishwasher soap a month, just send, just every two months, send me another three packs of, or whatever, three boxes of it. It's great stuff. It kind of makes shopping for groceries easy. But so I love Amazon doing this. I think the Android marketplace needs consolidation and to be better, not to be sort of splintered and have a mobile platform.

Justin Edelstein: But what if Amazon does it better, then Google doesn't have to do it?

Jason Atwood: I don't think that puts, I don't think that Google goes in a position of we're not gonna do it at that point. I think that just goes, oh, well someone else is gonna do it and take their cut and we're not gonna take our cut. I think this is more interesting from the standpoint of Amazon knows how to do this, I think better than Google would, but again, it's splintering the market. So then do I go, I want to get Angry Birds Rio, which should have been my app pick of the week. Maybe we should make our game pick for the week.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they're giving that away for free. That's part of the marketing that they're providing. They're doing free apps today, free apps this week, different, they really do know how to do this. They know how to sell stuff online.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, and they have a huge market, and millions and millions of people log in. So anyway, interesting part of your predictions for the year where it was, or I think as we talked about it, is really getting rid of the CD, right? No longer having CDs anymore. The App Store, the Android App Store, the Google Marketplace, the App Exchange, it's all getting there. And we're only in March. Wait to see what happens in the next two months.

19:31 Justin Edelstein: Our predictions are rocking this year. They are rocking. They're rocking.

Jason Atwood: You know what I predicted? Tell me. LinkedIn. 100 million users. No, you didn't. Yeah, I did. I'm gonna put that back in post. I'll go put that back into the podcast from last year. So yeah, I mean this is a big thing for LinkedIn, which in some ways is making it stand as the, not the anti-Facebook, but the Facebook for corporations. I don't even know. I actually think LinkedIn has some of the better, because it doesn't have a, it's not as, hmm, how do I put this? LinkedIn doesn't have a game in the social networking because it's not supposed to be social networking. So it can play nicely with any social networking. And because you're networking on a very high level, not a here's pictures of my kid level, but a here's what I did for, you know, in the last company, I think it can grow in that way, in that market very fast because I'll admit, someone LinkedIn me that I'm not even sure of, I'm like sure, what are you gonna see? You're gonna see basically my resume. You want to follow my tweets and see which companies I follow? And it's like such high level stuff that I don't mind it. As opposed to Facebook, I'm much more protective because I am more apt to put things like, you know, pictures of kids, family, what I did last night, although, you know, that's not interesting to anybody anyway. But I think LinkedIn hitting 100 million users is huge. And I think that they're on a path to really, I don't know, I mean, I absolutely, one of my prediction this year was someone's gonna make a, to make a stand against Facebook and kind of take a big, you know, be the next up and comer. I don't think LinkedIn's that, in that, because I don't think people think of it that way, but I love some of the integration they're doing. I love the way that they integrate with, you know, other third parties. They're much more open about it.

Justin Edelstein: They have apps too. I mean, just like Facebook, they have, you know, that you can install on top of your profile, right? You go to your profile and it's like, oh, would you like to install more apps to make your profile more rich, right? More sections. And the sections have like all these different, you know, skill levels. Like you can add your certifications. You can add any patents or publications that you've done or skills or you know, really sort of. You're reading this.

Jason Atwood: I use the one from Amazon which allows me to put up the books I'm interested in reading and I can follow other people. Your blog? Yep. A Box.net account. Yes. Whatever, you know, a SlideShare account.

Justin Edelstein: You can put your slides that you've done. So, you know, it's really professional. I use LinkedIn sort of as my, you know, not my real address book, but it's like, oh, remember that person I worked with like three years ago. I wanted to reach out to them. Oh, they're, I'll just go into LinkedIn and just type in their name and boom, there they I'm already LinkedIn with them.

22:35 Jason Atwood: I used to, the other day, I was looking for, someone was asking about a company that I had not done business with, so I didn't have any context from them, but I'm like, I remember going to an event where I literally typed the name of the company, up came the company page, and there were three people who I had as first connections. One of them was in sales, and I was like, oh, well, that's an easy connection. I can say, and then I remember where I met him from, because the connection was, oh, I saw the picture, and I was like, great, and I contacted him directly. Again, I think it's a great, great tool. I don't know how they bust out of it, or maybe if they have enough. Do they start reselling data like Jigsaw? That could be interesting.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I would not like that. I think you have to be very upfront with that when you start your service, and you're like, your data's up for sale.

Jason Atwood: But what do you care? As long as it's right. I'd rather my data and my title and my phone number be right than up here.

Justin Edelstein: I'd wanna opt into that.

Jason Atwood: Okay, well maybe they'll make it an opt-in. They'll opt you in.

Justin Edelstein: Again, I'm fine with it, but I'd rather know that it's happening than not know. The point is sometimes you can't see things in there because you don't want, you do have privacy settings. My favorite thing actually about LinkedIn is looking at the people who've looked at you in the last seven days. That feature right there is enough for me to want to upgrade sometimes and be like, God, I wish I knew who that tech professional in the New York City greater metropolitan area was. And it sometimes prevents me from clicking on other people. I'm like, I don't want to click on them. I don't want them to know I was looking at their face.

Jason Atwood: The only thing is when I go to Facebook and I go look at someone else's pictures, I'm always like, I wonder if they are going to start this feature on Facebook. It's like, Jason Atwood is looking at pictures of you.

Justin Edelstein: It's like, oh, what's he doing?

Jason Atwood: Why is he looking at pictures?

Justin Edelstein: Scumbag.

Jason Atwood: So, wow. I'll edit that out in post.

Justin Edelstein: We have a lot of editing to do in this podcast. We do a lot of editing.

Jason Atwood: Do-do-do-do-do-do. So let's finish up the podcast with some Cloud Focus at Picks of the Week. I'll let you go first. What have you got from force.com Labs?

Justin Edelstein: Nothing from force.com Labs. No, I do love the force.com Labs, and they did release something today, but I haven't had a chance to really look at it. I might pick it next week. But in the meantime, I'm going to pick a tool that it is for Salesforce and it's meant for administrators. And it's a great time saver. It's called Power Admin Tools by Software Anywhere. It's on the App Exchange. It is free. That's good. And what it does is it creates a tab in Salesforce that you can add to any app called admin. And within this admin tab, it gives you access to all those things that you have to dig four levels down to get to in the administrator screen. If I wanted to view every field on an account, right now I'm one click away from it. If I wanted to look at any workflow rules on a case,

25:48 Justin Edelstein: I'm one click away from it. If I wanna look at all the page layouts for a lead, I'm one click away from it. I don't have to click my name, click setup, go over to customize, click customize, open that up, find the object, open the object, and then look at the thing to see what I wanna look at. That's like four or five clicks. It's just in a tab. And you could create list views of them. So they have standard, it comes with all object standard, objects custom. And you can add columns to your list views and remove them. It's actually a really good time saver. Great for a Salesforce admin that's always in the setup area, particularly since Salesforce removed the setup link. This really just kills it.

Jason Atwood: Not that we're bitter about that at all. This kills it though.

Justin Edelstein: This is just way better than that. So I would recommend it. Power Admin Tools. How much? I said free. Oh, free? Buy software anywhere, just free. Nice. Go to it. Go, great.

Jason Atwood: I'm gonna actually pick something that I've been using for the longest time, but I think I could have sworn I picked. Maybe we've talked about, Um, which is that if you're a Google Calendar, Google Apps user, um, and you have, uh, you want to be able to keep your Google Calendar and your Salesforce Calendar in sync, um, the Aperio has a tool called Aperio Calendar Sync, which is actually, uh, which actually syncs on a schedule, um, your Salesforce Calendar and your, your Google Calendar. So that's somewhat useful. I mean, they're both browser-based, so it's like, OK, well, I can jump back and forth between two browser windows. But what makes it more powerful is that Google Calendar then can be done a lot of things with, including subscribing to it. So what's nice about Google Calendar is you can subscribe to those calendars from other calendaring, like desktop calendaring applications, like Outlook or iCal. So you can have a calendar subscription using CalDev, which is the calendar subscription, one of the standards for two-way subscription, meaning you can edit. So I can use iCal on my Mac, have a calendar there for Arcus, and I can add events, see what's on. I can mash that up over a calendar of my personal. So I have my personal calendar, which syncs with my iPhone. So what's nice is, and I was talking with a client about this the other day. They're like, do you put everything on one calendar? I said, no, I have multiple calendars. I just need to be able to see them in one view, because that's the essence of calendars is I want to be able to see, here's all my Arca stuff. Here's all my personal stuff. Oh yeah, here's the Jets calendar. There's the schedule. Oh, here's the birthday calendar that's pulling from my address book. And what did I put in the other day? I put in something. Oh, the holiday calendar. So you can have them all mash up, and you can pick which ones you want to see, but then throw them all on top of each other so you can make sure there's no.

Justin Edelstein: And the reason why we use Salesforce's calendar as sort of our gold calendar, even though it syncs with our Google Apps calendar, as opposed to using Google calendars, because in Salesforce you can relate events to things and people. So we like to see this event was related to this client for this project. And we can see that, and then that syncs down to the Google Cal, which sort of just has the blocked off time with the location and the description and what have you. But that's why we sync them back and forth so that we can have them in multiple places. Right.

29:17 Jason Atwood: Because that, right, we do.

Justin Edelstein: You lose that rich data, the Salesforce data, if you use Google as the gold copy, although you absolutely can. And then your events will just flow into Salesforce. But they lose a little meaning if they're not related to things. Or if you don't add the meaning. I do it the other way.

Jason Atwood: I'll get an event via email. I'll click on it, accept it in iCal. It will then sync automatically to Google Calendar, which will then within the two hour time period, because that's what the free calendar period does, syncs over to Salesforce. And then in Salesforce, I'll enrich it. So it'll come across as just an event, and then it'll go add in the who and the what that's related to a person and a thing. So it's an opportunity or a project. We do all our project management in Salesforce. So then I enrich it on that side, so I can track that and see the relationship when I go back into it. It really works, works great. I finally figured out how to get to sort of, I try to keep most of the things in Salesforce, but it does work both ways. You know, not always perfect. There's always sometimes you're like, wait, I thought that was there, but I would find 90% of the time I feel like it works.

Justin Edelstein: Sometimes my stuff gets duped, and other times, events that I deleted months ago just show back up somehow. Show up again. Sometimes it works 100% of the time.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty, well, anyway, that's my, it's free. They have a, actually. Two free picks this week, how about that? They have a paid version of it. I can't tell you what it does off the, I think you can set it more frequently, and I think you can then sync contacts.

Justin Edelstein: Perhaps you get support with that paid one? Ah. Because there's no support for the free one.

Jason Atwood: Right, you're kind of on your own. Which is good and bad. But anyway, a period of Google Calendar sync, I think you should be native. I wish Salesforce was just built at native. It shouldn't be an installable thing.

Justin Edelstein: That's very funny you say that because a client was talking to me about the Google integration. And although it's there, it's-

Jason Atwood: All built by a barrier.

Justin Edelstein: Well, and there's also very loose things, loose ends. The Outlook integration works really well. You can add an email that you get that comes in. an incoming email received back from a contact or a lead. Well, how would you do that from Gmail?

Jason Atwood: Click the Gmail button.

Justin Edelstein: It's how the macro puts in the BCC for you. No, no, no, you're misunderstanding. And I send you an email, you're a contact in my sales force. You reply back to me with something important and I want to log that email. What do I do with it?

Jason Atwood: Oh, from where, from Gmail?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I have to forward it to the BCC address and then go in and solve the unresolved item. It's sort of clunky, like that should work. There should be like a browser button or an extension or something that someone knows.

Jason Atwood: I don't know if you're looking at my t-shirt, but my t-shirt has a safe harbor on it. And the safe harbor is, I know that there's plans down the road for Salesforce to get a little bit better about thinking about innovation.

Justin Edelstein: You gotta get tighter with Gmail.

Jason Atwood: I think it's email in general, where they're going to show you more threads and where they're going to allow you to reply to stuff. So like right now, the problem with email events that are logged in Salesforce is you You can't start from that and then reply to it.

32:32 Justin Edelstein: You can do it in cases, but that's the only place you can do it. Cases has an emails-related list. Now we're getting Salesforce geeky ass.

Jason Atwood: Well, it's Cloud Focus Weekly podcast. So that was it. If you want to get more geeky or read Larry's blog post, maybe give him a call. Maybe give him a call. The phone will ring. Yeah, blog.arkasync.com. You want to follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash arkasync. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. and I'm on Twitter at twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. Justin is at twitter.com slash justedelstein and we're all on Facebook, facebook.com slash arkasinc. Best way to subscribe to the podcast is in iTunes. Subscribe there, leave a great review if you enjoy the podcast. We'd love to see that there. Also, we're on LinkedIn. So go on over to LinkedIn, search for arkasinc and you can, I'll link you with anybody. Me too. I have 722, I'll go to 3,000. or I'll go to 11. Alrighty, so until next week, enjoy those, well enjoy those cloudy days.