My Car is My Best Friend - Episode #45 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 45th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last week of May 2011. This episode is titled, My Car is My Best Friend. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me today for the 45th time on this very special, nice warm day here in New York. I don't know why I always have to mention the weather, but I do because it's good on a podcast that you hear like a week later, like what the weather was a week ago. Very important. But here not to talk about the weather, other than those cloudy days. It's Justin Elskey. Justin, how are you? Co-host of Cloud Focus Weekly.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, don't forget my title of co-host. Doing well. One of my favorite podcasts, his opening thing is, it's a sunny day in Southern California, or it's a hazy day, my favorite podcast. What is it? The BS Report by Bill Simmons, BSPN. That's how he starts off his podcast. Some of his guests are like, why do you even say that? He's like, I don't know. It's just the way to start the show. So that's what we do. way to start the show. Finally the spring slash summer weather has arrived in the Northeast.

Jason Atwood: We skipped over spring. It went from a cold miserable... No, spring just rained. It got down to 50s weird stuff. But we have other things on the agenda than the weather. We do. We should put that as a first. First, we have Salesforce news that we'll go over. We have some big news. We have some news about cars. From Japan. And some news about bands. Car bands. Car bands. We have some Twitter news. Twitter's been kind of doing some stuff lately and we got some news about that. More than just tweeting? More than just tweeting. We have a bunch of stuff because we did some research last week on Twitter when we were finding out who's where and there's a couple pieces of Twitter news that you want to hang in there for. And then we get Sparrow gets social which is going back to where I blog post I wrote a long time ago about email clients and why aren't email clients getting more social. So one is. So you want to hear about that. I'm not going to make it my pick of the week, because I already have. And then we have, of course, ending up the Cloud Focus app pick of the week, which is clearly the most liked part of this podcast. We knew that, because that's why we put it at the end. I have two this week. You have two?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I have two. Because you're usually the one that's like, I have four this week. And then you just throw them in there. That's true. So I actually put two on the Google Wave so that you would see them. Nice, nice.

Jason Atwood: Way to work Wave in there.

Justin Edelstein: Always try.

Jason Atwood: All right, so let's kick it off with the Salesforce news. Big news for Salesforce. Give me the first one.

Justin Edelstein: Big announcement in Japan earlier in the week, Salesforce and Toyota have partnered to create a private label social network for Toyota. It's gonna be called, I believe it's gonna be called Toyota Friend. And this is essentially having Salesforce's technology power a social network for Toyota customers. And the Toyota customers, kind of the neat, interesting aspect of it, I think, is that Toyota customers will be able to interact with their car, as if their car is their friend on a social network. And actually be a- Say what? Say what now? Yeah, your car is your friend. So I think this is an extremely interesting use of this social layer of the Salesforce or force.com

03:40 Jason Atwood: platform, whereby I'm about to. I was just about to. We'll do it now. All right.

Justin Edelstein: So I have a Scion, which is actually made by Toyota. Doubt my car is going to work with this. But anyway.

Jason Atwood: And the way you treat your car, you wouldn't want to be friends with it.

Justin Edelstein: My car would be like, I hate you, Justin. Unfriend. Unfriend. Unfriend you now. So essentially what the car is going to be able to do is talk back through chatter, really. Is it chatter?

Jason Atwood: Is it chatter behind it?

Justin Edelstein: I believe it is. No announcement that says it's chatter or not, but I believe it's chatter. It's those social aspects of feeds and alerting. And your car is going to be able to say, I need an oil change. Or my belt is broken. take me to the shop." Or like instead of having the check engine light, when you get in your car and turn it on, it's gonna let you know, hey, check your engine. It's gonna post it right to you. Your dealer will be able to interact with your dealership or your service center and say, you know, I need to get my car serviced, or it might even know your car needs servicing and be able to push out to you and say, hey, your car needs servicing because we know through the...there's a word that they've been using here within the car like telenetics or something like that. I'm gonna find that exact word in a moment. And be able to say, hey, we have an opening today at 1130. Do you want it? And like, you know, be able to bring your car in. clear to me whether or not this is going to be just between you, your car, and Toyota, or whether this is going to be between you, your car, Toyota, and any other Toyota car owner. Not 100% sure.

Jason Atwood: Or since you're saying that it's, I guess the interesting thing that I'm thinking about is it is it its own private closed social network? Yes. It's not connected to Facebook.

Justin Edelstein: It will be able to connect to other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but it It is in of itself its own social network built using Salesforce's technology. Got it. Okay. Really interesting. I love the kind of spin.

Jason Atwood: I mean, part of me thinks, what's the difference between this and my car sending me an email? I mean, I'm going to get old school here. Why not just send me an email when you need an oil change? Why not send me an email when you go post on my Toyota social network wall? wall? Why don't you tell me? There's gonna be a funny cartoon about you walk, you get into your car, it's broken, and you can't figure out why until you go home and jump on the internet, and then you go, oh, man, my car's belt was broken. I didn't know in the car because it posted on my wall, which I don't see until I get home. So, but interesting.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, it's gonna be available on mobile devices, it's gonna be able to, I imagine you'll be able to set it, like SMS me or something. Right, do other things with it. Do other things with it, you'll be able to, I'm sort of reading through the press release, which is really press release-y, it's not too detailed. It's a light. You'll be able to extend it through other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. I think it's interesting, it might not be the biggest thing in the world because it's the first one, but since they're doing it, it'll spark many other ideas of other things that could potentially use like these private social networks to let you know about things.

07:17 Jason Atwood: And clearly, you know, telematics by the way is the word I was looking for. Well we talked a lot about the app the other day that we, I think I made this one of my pick of the week, but Glimpse. The ability to sort of send someone where your location was and you know, one of the things that I struggle with because I'm forbidden from texting while driving because it's not good and I would never do that. It's also against the law. And it's against the law. You're forbidden by other things. Than my wife. But when I want to send that glimpse, you know, would that be cool if they were built into the car? Sort of like I could just go sitting in the car, go quick, quick, send, you know, to this person or these people and it's connected to a social network. You know, having the car talk to Facebook and pull in my friends' profiles, not for me to read but maybe for me to call because it has their email, their phone number. So I think there's, there's certainly stuff if you, you know, if I brainstormed why I would want my car to be talking socially, it could check in from me everywhere. As we drove along, it just checks into highways. Jason, now we just checked into I-95 on foursquare. I don't know, interesting stuff. But cool, cool that, that Salesforce is behind it. Well, it's interesting because Toyota also has

Justin Edelstein: this enormous relationship with, with Microsoft. Right. And Azure. They're building a lot of stuff in Azure, so it'll be interesting to see where these two things

Jason Atwood: intermingle if they ever do. Speaking of Microsoft, it's not on the schedule, but I have to bring it up as just a little side comic. I don't know what it is, but go ahead. So Balmer, Steve Balmer, yes, the ruler of all things Microsoft, a hedge fund manager, obviously owns a lot of Microsoft stock, has called for him to resign. Really? Yeah, after a couple days ago that what happened was he came out on these developer conferences and we all remember the dancing monkey boy yeah I was like you to video ten years of ten years ago or something developers developers developers and get sweaty and it just gets out of breath was really sweaty it's hysterical find that on

Justin Edelstein: YouTube yes it's called yes Steve Ballmer bomber dancing crazy we'll get

Jason Atwood: it there monkey boy yeah but so you know there's been lots of the other day he announced a bunch of features that were coming, I think he said like 500 features are coming into Windows 8 or something like that. And then he wouldn't give the details and then say the details were coming and I guess PR had to retract on it and say, well, we're not going to talk about how many features and we're not talking about the timeline. So it was one of those, you know, oops moments, but he's had more than a few of these oops moments. So anyway, someone's calling for him to resign. Interesting. happen. But to be honest, as he has led this company, Microsoft that is, and again, I'm nowhere near the issue. I try not to use Microsoft tools. Well, I use them as appropriate if I like them, but generally they're not as good. I just find it interesting that he sort of has been the problem for that company in a lot of ways. I mean, it's sort of-

10:19 Justin Edelstein: I think that company has a many, a plethora of problems.

Jason Atwood: It lost direction. Microsoft has lost direction.

Justin Edelstein: They want to, at the same time, move forward and into the cloud. As they want to do that, it cuts into a core of their business. You have to imagine that there are big execs on two sides of one table and one saying, we must move to the cloud and platforms must move to the cloud. There's another one saying, but I sell tons of stuff.

Jason Atwood: I sell software for $400 a shot.

Justin Edelstein: Lots of it. So no. But that's the thing.

Jason Atwood: Their whole business is selling operating systems, which aren't going away anytime soon. Even Google Chromium or whatever is an operating system and will still sit. It's open source, but it sits on a piece of hardware. I don't know. I think it's interesting. They haven't innovated in a long, long time.

Justin Edelstein: While we're on the Microsoft rat hole.

Jason Atwood: Rat hole.

Justin Edelstein: I put my, I tweeted a picture of me, My Mac now will boot in Mac OS X and Windows 7. And it wasn't very difficult to do.

Jason Atwood: Well, you had to try two different versions of Microsoft Windows.

Justin Edelstein: Well, no, I needed the right version of Windows. I needed Windows 7. It wouldn't work for XP. So I needed Windows 7. But then once I got through it, I can now kind of boot my Mac as a Windows machine. Fun, fun for everyone.

Jason Atwood: This has nothing to do with Cloud Focus.

Justin Edelstein: I just went there. We were talking about Microsoft.

Jason Atwood: Let's get back on to Salesforce and the other small bit of news.

Justin Edelstein: DF11.

Jason Atwood: For DF11, tagged hash DF11.

Justin Edelstein: Can you do that verbally, hash something? I just did it. I've done it in emails. It still doesn't work. But I'm going to keep trying. Maybe soon.

Jason Atwood: Until someone puts it in one of their emails. Is Metallica, is the band at Dreamforce 11, we're talking about, Salesforce's annual user conference, which is happening the end of August. For those of you who have not registered or signed up, I think there's some specials. I think there's no developer specials and there's still there's the nonprofit special It's a nonprofit special 50 bucks, and I think there's still like a sign up early 699 special We are going to be sponsors there, which is great. Arcus will be there but so now Metallica is going to be leading off the sort of Musical guests last year. It was Stevie Wonder two years ago. It was Foo Fighters three years ago. It was You too. No, I see you too. They always play you Who was it? They had the Foo Fighters there. Who was it three years ago?

Justin Edelstein: Oh, well they had Stephen Wonder, they had the Black Crows. Black Crows was... And then they had Foo Fighters before that. Okay. I don't remember the one before that. I don't even know if I was at that Dream Force before that. Maybe. So anyway, Metallica, that's kind of interesting. I think... There's a lot of little rumors floating, like it's going to be an outdoor show, a lot of things floating around on the Twitter, but yet none of it's yet confirmed from at Dream Force or at Salesforce, but it seems like Metallica is going to be the thing. This is from Inside Sources, unnamed Inside Sources. But not your real, I don't

13:24 Jason Atwood: really know your music taste too much. Not really my music taste. I'm more of a

Justin Edelstein: Gimme the Black Crows or Stevie Wonder, but I really did enjoy the Foo Fighters, which I didn't really know I okay, you know, but then when I saw them live I I really loved them. So thinking maybe, you know, seeing a band live gives you a whole another appreciation for them. And as a Yankee fan, Enter Sandman has a special place in my heart as Mariano comes out and closes out games at Yankee Stadium. They play Enter Sandman because obviously he's closing out the game.

Jason Atwood: So you'll wait for, so that one song. That'll be a big one. That'll be worth it. Enter Sandman. So cool. So I'm sure. Off Pit at Dreamforce. I'm sure there'll be more to come about that. We will have tons of news about Dreamforce coming up as the months go on. We have entire podcasts about. We might be there. We might be live from Metallica.

Justin Edelstein: I think we should do a pod from the floor.

Jason Atwood: Well, we decided we were going to. I mean, it's going to have a lot of ambient noise. Yeah. But people could swing by.

Justin Edelstein: We'll tell you when we do it. We'll do some interviews. What have you. We're announcing this now. We're making it up on the fly. There you go.

Jason Atwood: So, other news.

Justin Edelstein: Let's talk about the Twitter.

Jason Atwood: In the Twitter land, a couple big things. One, I think, well, one's huge and then two then two sort of are smaller. The big one is that Twitter has bought TweetDeck for $40 million. This comes on the back of actually buying another application which we just helped a client get off of because they shut it down. So there's a good Twitter slash story which is Twitter bought a company called DabbleDB which is an online database with a user interface not sort of what database.com is, or will be when it releases. It's you know, is it Excel on steroids? Is it Google Docs on steroids?

Justin Edelstein: It's like those Intuit products that they have, where it's just like a database.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's Access Online. Yeah, like SharePoint, sort of. So anyway, they They bought it. They bought that and shut it down.

Justin Edelstein: They bought it for the people apparently.

Jason Atwood: Well, they apparently bought it for not that product. They bought it for this other product. The side product. The side product, which was interesting. And then they bought TweetDeck, which TweetDeck is... That's a bigger one. Yeah, TweetDeck is a... It's basically an app. It's a client app. So they've now bought... They bought Tweety and turned it into Twitter, which is both the iPhone and Mac OS X versions.

Justin Edelstein: And that's the Twitter app now. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: deck will likely be incorporated. I think it'll be its own thing because TweetDeck is really about spreading out a lot. I mean I've seen it I'll tell you where I see it is I see it on Meet the Press. I watch Meet the Press the podcast and they at the end of Meet the Press now they go over kind of cool because what you know Meet the Press kind of is a newsmaker so whatever they say in Meet the Press sometimes makes news immediately so that at the end of the show because it's a live show they'll go over to Twitter and TweetDeck and say what is trending now based on what we just said in the last 57 minutes. And then they'll say, oh well that comment or this comment, so it's kind of cool, but they use TweetDeck as sort of the show-off of all the things. Well it's a lot like SeesMake. SeesMake is

16:41 Justin Edelstein: like multi-pane view of Twitter. Hootsuite has a very similar look and feel, like multi-panes. I've actually never used TweetDeck on the Mac, I've used it on the iPad. But I'm just a fan of regular old Twitter app. Twitter.app.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. I haven't gotten into it. Maybe I'm, you know, the people who use Hootsuite and things like that are usually Power Power Power users. I feel like I'm a tweeter.

Justin Edelstein: They're like marketing Power Marketer.

Jason Atwood: Or they might have clients they're doing stuff for. I know one of my friends who runs a company that does social network, he has clients who he tweets for. So he uses Hootsuite to have multiple profiles. Yeah, so and the other thing is Twitter's launched a new product a new feature Which that came out two days ago, and I got it today Which is when someone retweets you you get an email that tells you that someone retweeted your story kind of interesting I have yet to get this, but I got one this morning So interesting stuff. I mean Twitter is obviously making Making more and more headway Oh, and then in other news which we actually forgot to cover in Twitter news. You and I were having a discussion about who's the most followed. We did, we were. Because believe it or not, we had the same conversation, but we're not in front of the mic.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, now we have to repeat them. Yeah, so we were- They're better the first time, though.

Jason Atwood: We were talking about the who's the most followed, and how do you get rankings, how do you get statistics. We went and looked it up, and basically went to go find, you know, we said who do we think is the most followed person, celebrity, whatever. And it happened to be Lady Gaga, who had just passed, like a day before, 10 million followers. The first 10 million follower person. First and only so far. So Bieber is right behind her. Biebs right there. Bieber with Bieber fever. And then Barack is right behind them. Which I, you say is kind of strange, you know, to have our president not be the number one. I thought he would be number one. I think being number three is pretty cool.

Justin Edelstein: Because he is. I think it's phenomenal for a president and not like a entertainment celebrity. He's a celebrity, but he's not like a, he's not an entertainer. He's the president, I thought he would have been number one just because he's on there and like you would think almost anybody on Twitter would just follow him. But I don't know because I signed up for Twitter like long long long ago. Like when you first signed up now. About two days after I did. Yeah, back a long long time ago. I think it was 2007 our date was. It was. Whatever. When you sign up like it doesn't He's like, splash people in front of you. You should follow these people. I mean, you would assume he would show up on everybody's and they'd be like, yeah, I'll follow Barack.

Jason Atwood: I think the problem is that, and this is what was our comment offline, while he is a celebrity, his tweets, and this is the personal nature of Twitter and why people love Twitter is because it's very personal. You feel like Oprah is tweeting to you. You feel like Lady Gaga is talking to you because you're one of her little monsters or whatever. So you feel this connection. When you know it's the president who can barely have a piece of technology that's not from the last 10 years that has a BlackBerry solo lockdown that it can only do two things, you know it's not him. He's not waking up in the morning like, oh, just met with the prime minister and off to lunch at Sporro's. I mean, no, it's just going to be.

20:12 Justin Edelstein: It's going to the pizza place, Sporro? Yes, Sporro. Is it in the mall?

Jason Atwood: Just met with Darryl Revis in New York City. No, he's not. I think the problem is it's not him, the person. You know it's not him. And if it is him, that's amazing. I'm going to go follow him tomorrow. But I know it's not him. It's some sort of PR, whatever, and whatever. So with Lady Gaga and the Beaver Fever, at least I think you think that it's the real person. And they probably talk from their voice, meaning. Do you think it is?

Justin Edelstein: Do you think it is Lady Gaga? Or do you think it's some person that she hired to do that?

Jason Atwood: If I were the super celebrity, I would not the person who types it, but I could easily say, hey, tweet that I'm at this, tweet that I'm at this bar right now and tell it to my personal assistant and they would do it.

Justin Edelstein: How lazy is that?

Jason Atwood: Well, she's doing a million things.

Justin Edelstein: Oh sure, she's like singing and dancing.

Jason Atwood: What's she going to tweet in the middle of her songs? Doing a million things. She's not doing a million things.

Justin Edelstein: She's not some, she's Lady Gaga. She's not Barack Obama.

Jason Atwood: Alright, I have another rat hole. It's a cloud rat hole though. Ready, ready for it? It's acceptable. It's good. It's my .01 pick of the week, which is that Amazon launched her new album, which came up this last week. Oh, yeah. It launched her new album and launched it for 99 cents. The whole album. Did you buy it? I did. And the reason they did that, they made a deal with her, obviously. Normally it's whatever, $12.99 on iTunes. But if you bought it through Amazon for this one day, although they've now redone it, so if you go right now whenever you hear this podcast, I think it's still available, you can get the 99 cent version. wait. And but it obviously downloads into your cloud drive, right? So this is all tying into what we talked about before with cloud drives and streaming and all that and obviously Amazon's making... So how do I get to it? So you can stream it right there or you can download it to your iTunes. Okay. I did it and you know what happened? Broke. It broke and everybody's been complaining. It did not, it did not down, it did not give me all her songs. It left out three tracks. So I have like... And you actually went to download it. No, when I went here, no, we're missing. It was one, two, three, five, nine, it was missing tracks. An hour later it was missing tracks. It's digital, it's on the cloud, how could it be missing tracks? You're just, you're not even copying it over to me, you're just enabling me for it. So apparently they've apologized, Amazon's apologized. Did they refund your 99 cents? No, because I think it'll eventually show up, but cloud fail, cloud drive fail, to me that's like the first time I was like, yeah, why don't I just try it? Because, A, it's cheap, or $10 cheaper, that's worth a quick of amount. And you were buying it anyway. And I'm, yeah, I am. Hey, I'm a little, no, I'm not a little monster. Um, but so anyway, it didn't work. And so I immediately thought, yeah, this is why, this is why iTunes is going to do just fine because they got this. I've never bought it, no, that's not true. I bought one song on iTunes that didn't come down correctly. And I emailed them and they refunded me and it came down correctly and they're very good on it with their support.

23:12 Jason Atwood: So anyway, interesting stuff. Wow, we're going all over the place. So let's go to our last piece of little news. It's kind of tiny. It's tiny, tiny news. We sprinkled in lots of Microsoft and Lady Gaga, so I think we can make up for it. So an application that I talked about, I guess launched for like, I think it was 99 cents, maybe it was 10 bucks or something, on the Mac OS X app store, which is a new email client. It was supposed to be very minimalized, very quick, read from and work with Google really well. It looked a lot like the Twitter. Yeah, it had a new interface, kind of like things slid out like the Twitter app, like both the iPad and the regular Twitter app. It was cool and whatever. Again, I love me some email clients. I do. I would collect them. I was a Eudora fan. Dior went away. So they're now releasing a new version. And the interesting piece of this is that they're going to be integrating social networks. So specifically, Facebook.

Jason Atwood: So anybody you're sending to and from, their Facebook profile will be pulled in via their email. So it'll look them up. And then you can friend them from right in, the email. So it basically is tying in. And this is exactly what I think I talked about in some blog posts many months ago, which is why haven't email clients sort of gotten this. And then I think that's the big question. The first post on the story, I think it's on TechCrunch, said the first post was like, why hasn't Google done this? Even with their own service, like why have they not integrated in Gmail social networking? It's right there. It's web-based. It's easy. Why don't you do it? The most they've done is put online status if you have Gtalk or whatever their IM service going. So anyway, I'm not making it my pick of the week, but if you haven't checked out Spiro, it's a $10 app, I think. And the next version, which is coming out very soon, will have Facebook integration. I'll let you know once I play with it how cool it is. So speaking of not picks of the week, why don't you give us two of your CloudFolks at picks of the week.

Justin Edelstein: Sure. So I have two picks. Excellent. One is a Salesforce AppExchange product by Candor.

Jason Atwood: Oh wow, it's going to say force to come live?

Justin Edelstein: No, no, no, no, not them. The app is called Field Trip. It is free.

Jason Atwood: OK.

Justin Edelstein: And Field Trip does something that a lot of us admins wish that we had built into the platform. It tells you which fields are being used and which aren't on specific objects or records, record by record. So you can say, on the accounts, show me what percentage of accounts have this custom field that I built filled out.

Jason Atwood: Oh, so it's data put in, not field used on different page layouts.

Justin Edelstein: No, field used by users with data in it. So if you have an object with 400 fields, and you want to get rid of 300 of them, because because 400 fields is ridiculous. And someone says, no, no, no, you can't get rid of those fields. We use those fields. You can use FieldTrip to say, you know what? We have like 40,000 of these records and 1% of them use this field for something.

26:41 Jason Atwood: Now you could have done that in a report, but it would be painful.

Justin Edelstein: Extremely painful.

Jason Atwood: You have to go field by field and say, is blank or isn't blank or is filled out.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, it would be really hard to do. you can report on these field trip records.

Jason Atwood: Oh, so it builds its own sub-record?

Justin Edelstein: Right, and then you can report on it. Okay, cool. So it uses some batch processing to run through all the records, report back into its own records that you can view, and then report on those so that you can go to stakeholder and say, hey, you had this field that you asked me to build eight months ago and literally nobody's using it. So let's get it off the page because it's cluttering things up and hurting adoption. I thought that was a great product. Got it from Twitter. I was going back and forth with some people about Easy Describe, which is a pick that I've made in the past. Someone said, hey, is it similar to Field Trip? Then I looked at Field Trip and I said, oh, not quite.

Jason Atwood: Between Field Trip, Easy Describe and the one you picked a couple weeks ago, the one that shows you the... The GRD diagram. Yeah, those are some real powerful, those are high powerful.

Justin Edelstein: Very good tools.

Jason Atwood: That might be, end up being a blog post itself.

Justin Edelstein: I am helping the Salesforce admin. And the next one that I wanted to pick, I don't think this app is new, but it's new to me. It's called WhatsApp Messenger. And this is a cross-platform mobile messaging device, or messaging app. So if you're, you know, this came from a couple friends of mine, they have Blackberries, and they all BBM each other, the Blackberry Messenger. Are you familiar?

Jason Atwood: I am, I have not had a Blackberry in about, I guess about a year and a half.

Justin Edelstein: It's like a closed little messenger service that's only on the Blackberry, and you can have groups of people and have these little conversations. They're not SMSs, they don't count against your text, they're not emails, They're just quick, they're like chats, it's like chat.

Jason Atwood: It's persistent, so it shows you where you left off.

Justin Edelstein: Persistent, has groups, all that kind of thing. Nice. So a couple of them moved off of Blackberries and moved on to either iPhones or Androids, and some still have Blackberries, and they're like, oh, this stinks, we're missing out on BBM, we used to have BBM, so now we all have this app, WhatsApp. So we all installed it, and it's like BBM, but cross-platform, so you can have an Android, You can have an iPhone, you can have a Blackberry, and it's self-contained within this app, but it also has push notifications and badges. So you can see, oh, I have two new messages there. You can create groups, you can send your location, you can send pictures, you can send voice.

Jason Atwood: So why would I want to use this app? The only reason I'd want to use this app is if I had friends on BBN.

Justin Edelstein: No, because it doesn't use BBN. It uses WhatsApp.

Jason Atwood: Oh, it's its own thing. It's its own thing. It doesn't connect to BBN.

29:42 Justin Edelstein: not connect to BBM, it came out because a bunch of my, this is how it came to me, like five or six friends had Blackberries and then a couple of them moved off and they would talk to each other using BBM. This is, if you don't want to use SMS, you only got 200 text messages and you send like 50 of them a day to all your friends and you don't want to send emails, you want to just have these little quick short form messages, you use this app.

Jason Atwood: So you don't want to have instant message which exists and hasn't existed forever, it's

Justin Edelstein: an open format. Yeah, it's hard to do like groups and stuff on the instant messengers on the phones. The groups. Okay. Like you can have like a group of six or seven people

Jason Atwood: that you can have a chat. Don't want to use chatter. A chatter group? Private chatter?

Justin Edelstein: Personal chatter? Chatter.com free? No, not even there. Not even close. But yeah, 99 cents.

Jason Atwood: Interesting. In the iPhone app store. But it's its own system. So it's closed. It's

Justin Edelstein: So the system goes over the Wi-Fi, does not use your SMS, so if you have a limit like 200, don't have to worry about it.

Jason Atwood: Something more to waste my time. I think it's great. I think it's cool. Yeah, no, it sounds good. I just, I had no, I wouldn't give no use because I don't have anybody I'd want and we, basically everybody I know uses text. It would be like doing a seismic shift to everybody and be like, time to get off that thing that you're barely comfortable doing.

Justin Edelstein: Here, here's, so you, me, and our partner that remains nameless. Yes. The three of us. Yes. If we all had the app, we can have a little group chat for the three of us and just instead of having to, when you text somebody on the iPhone and you text two people. Right. It breaks. You know, it breaks the ... It actually doesn't. It comes back as two as well. No, it doesn't.

Jason Atwood: I, I'm, I've had multiple examples of on the iPhone now. If you text two people and they respond back, it comes back into the same chat with both people. And then if you respond again, it responds back to everybody. I've seen five.

Justin Edelstein: The incoming does not stay within that stream. Yes, it does. The back, no. I'll show you an example. I will tweet it. Unless this is extremely brand new, this is news to me. Because for me, I've always texted out to like three people, and it goes out to three people, then they respond, and it goes into like their own and I'm like what oh it's like completely out of

Jason Atwood: literally happened the other day it came back some someone tweeted out to five or SMS out to five people three of which I knew two of which I didn't I then responded thinking it would only go back to the one it went back to everybody they all then saw it two of them one of them responded who is this and why are you texting me yeah that's why you don't want that no listen what if he was your group of friends at work and then one of them who I didn't know responded and it went into the main body of the SMS where the original person had put the message and marked it off as that person. It was completely odd. This must be very new. I'm telling you, late breaking news. I've never seen it. I was traveling with you, I think I showed you. No you didn't. Okay. We're going to try this later. Oh yeah. I think it has something to do with the platform, you're on and if you have I don't know I do with some algorithm to it good pick well I think it's a great app that's that's great um so my one and only pick is something that could have been news but I I put it in the wave as news and

33:09 Jason Atwood: you moved it I moved it because it's it's my pick I have many many picks but I figured to throw this one out there because I actually tweeted it yesterday Which is that Seesmic Mobile. Seesmic who is a maker of, I wouldn't want to call them a Twitter client. Seesmic desktop. Which is a social client. It connects into Foursquare, it connects into Facebook, connects into Twitter and it does that all together. And the nice bit about it is you can do what you don't want to do a lot but you sometimes want to do sometimes which is post to this post to many of the same places. Shoot this everywhere. Yeah put this on my Facebook puts in Twitter put this somewhere and Seesmic Desktop announced I think six months ago that they were gonna maybe more that they were gonna include Seesmic Desktop with chatter integration. They had it out way before that because I tested it in like a beta version months before that but they announced it. No I know what I'm saying they okay so then it was it was sometime in the early fall anyway the point is I thought that's good but I I don't really like to go beyond, I like my one client, but on the mobile, I'm waiting for it to come. So it came out yesterday, the new release, Seesmic for iPhone, and I assume other platforms, sorry, I don't know, now includes Chatter integration. So you can now add Chatter accounts, multiple, to your iPhone client, and you can do the unthinkable, and it gives you a nice big warning when you do it. You're about to post to both a private and public place. Are you absolutely sure? But you can send one message out to multiple places, which is really great. So if you were to, again, you could connect up your two Twitter feeds and a Chatter feed and even a Facebook and send it out to all of them at the same time. The connection, the setup of it, when you go to sub-Chatter, little funky. It sends you an email. You then click on the email. You go back. It does a whole bunch of weird stuff that I wouldn't have expected it to do.

Jason Atwood: But it works. So I sent out a chat to both Twitter and to our internal chatter at the same time. So very cool. The problem is it's going to easily get behind. It's not going to have mentions, which already the iPhone app has. It's not going to have clickable topics. While it's there, it's not going to have the new features that are coming out in Chatter or push notifications, things like that. But anyway, that's Seesmic Mobile now has Chatter. And so that's my Cod Focus app pick of the week. And with that, I'll say the one thing we didn't mention, there's a couple new blog posts up on blog.arkusinc.com. Please go over there and check them out. You want to follow the company, it's at twitter.com slash arcusinc, A-R-K-U-S-I-N-Z. And Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein, just crossing 300 followers the other day. Congratulations. Big time. That's pretty good. It's not the 10 million. You have a little to go to get to 10 million.

36:13 Justin Edelstein: I'm chasing Gaga.

Jason Atwood: Chasing, that should have been the title of the podcast, Chasing Gaga.

Justin Edelstein: No, it just came right off the tongue.

Jason Atwood: I am at Twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood, and we're on Facebook, Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. We're also in Chatter, but you can't see us there. The podcast is subscribable in iTunes, where you can go in, subscribe to the podcast and then you'll get the podcast as soon as it comes out. It's the best place to do it. Leave a review there. We'd love that. We got a couple reviews but leave more. If you want to just rate it you can rate it quickly or you can actually leave a nice little review that we see. That's always great and we appreciate it. Until next week, on this week in Cloud Focus weekly, I'm gonna say week four times, have a nice week and enjoy those cloudy days.