The Truth is in the Cloud - Episode #47 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 47th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the second week of June, 2011. This episode is titled, The Truth Is In The Clouds. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing experts. I am your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me today for the 47th time, maybe for the 48th time next week. So co-host, co-founder, co-buddy, Justin. Justin Edelstein, how are you doing, Justin? I'm doing fantastic. Thank you. Feeling truth, truthiness? Yes. Feel the truthiness. We have we have a big agenda with but a very few things first We're gonna talk about iCloud and the new Apple release the new Apple announcement I wrote a blog post this week Which kind of talked about the little bit of how it hurts and helps the cloud computing movement as it were Then dreamforce 11 we got some social speakers talk about that how that might affect the things and maybe where the direction is going and And then Summer 11 is out, or coming out, it's out for us, it's out for others probably tonight for some others.

Jason Atwood: Don't have the full releases, too many pods to keep a track of at this point. It's up to like NA 10, 11, 12 at this point. And then of course we'll end off with our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. See it didn't roll off right off the tongue. So, let's get going and talk about iCloud. You were with me as we streamed sort of the announcement from Apple. It's a long time coming. We've been talking about it for months now. The surprising thing is the thing that we've been talking about now kind of turned into the littlest thing, which was that there would be music in the cloud. Right out of all the announcements. I feel like that one says okay. Everybody else is doing that You're doing a little bit different Apple, but you're doing it So but let's start with the the blog post because it's kind of start this in the conversation So I started thinking about you know cloud computing and the use of cloud terminology And sort of what does Apple do versus the others sort of players now Apple's been in the cloud meeting space for a long time With mobile me they even had an online like an ISP they had a version of sort of AOL they had their own I forgot what it's called like Apple Center or Online Center or something. There was .Mac too. Well .Mac was way after that so they had their own ISP like their own dial-up you could dial up into Apple World. Oh like AOL? Yeah. That kind of thing? Then they went into MobileMe or .Mac which then became which is interesting because .Mac became something that was .Mac was free then it became MobileMe and it became pay or

Justin Edelstein: .Mac wasn't free. Yes, it was. The original .Mac was. Well, it wasn't after a while. Before it got to MobileMe.

Jason Atwood: You used to have a free email, free thing. And then it went to my.

Justin Edelstein: My MobileMe password or login ID is still at Mac.com. Yeah. Not at me.com.

03:12 Jason Atwood: The Mac one they had was free for a long time. Then they started charging for about $99 a year. Then maybe they switched to MobileMe as a naming sake. And now it's coming back out. And it's been revamped. So the first big announcement, I guess, is that there's a new thing called iCloud, which we'll replace in totem, MobileMe. And we'll have a lot of free features to it. So first off, the stuff that's sort of basic, mail, contacts calendar, syncing to all devices all the time, happy, happy, free. No ads, which is a big kind of shout out or F-you to some of the other people out there who are putting out free email services, but no ads. This one will have no ads. Thoughts on it? Good? Keep your account? Yeah. I mean, I use it. I pay for it.

Justin Edelstein: So I'm happy to have it for free. Free is good. Free is good. I mean, I will say I've had some serious issues with MobileMe and syncing. The email works great. No problem with that. The calendar works great. No problem with that. The contacts, not so well. I have three main devices. I have my laptop. I have my iPhone and I have my iPad. They're all connected through MobileMe. And the contacts are not the same across the three devices.

Jason Atwood: I will say, I've had that problem too. I fixed the problem. And once I fixed it once, it's been good.

Justin Edelstein: I'm trying to fix it, and it just breaks again. So I stop trying to fix it, and I just deal with it. Just deal with it? Nice.

Jason Atwood: So now you won't have to pay for it. You'll just be freaky mad.

Justin Edelstein: Because I'm paying for something that's not quite working, but the mail works great. It works on the web. It works on my phone. It works on my laptop in Apple Mail or whatever else you might want to use. It works on the iPad. That part, it just works. Sure, it's email. It works.

Jason Atwood: So I guess I'll move off the sort of what's been announced, because we'll get back to that in a second. But no, let's actually keep going. So to announce that. The other two things we're not going to talk about were the Lion and iOS 5. Not going to talk about them. Great stuff. Great, but this is not the iOS or the OS X podcast. So the other stuff they announced in the cloud. So they announced a product called PhotoStream, which is basically contact syncing or calendar syncing or syncing syncing or email syncing for photos, in that you take a photo on one device and it syncs to every other device instantly.

Justin Edelstein: The crux of what we're going to be talking about and all these features is the image that they put up on during the keynote of the cord being cut with a scissor Essentially Apple's taking the approach that you have data and you want it wherever you are and we're gonna put it there Yeah, there's a photo and we're going there wisely. Yeah without a cord It's just gonna be there.

06:16 Jason Atwood: Well, you just said something that isn't true. You said it's a photo, it's a move. No, they never said movies are gonna sync wirelessly across all devices.

Justin Edelstein: They said you're, they said music. Music. Not movies. There's a difference. There is a difference.

Jason Atwood: If it were movies, I would have been very happy. Although again, I think that brings up the same problem we were just discussing before the podcast, which is what happens if my Mac has tons of space on it? And we all talk about our Drobos, and I have four something terabytes. great, I can download as many movies as I want. I have hundreds and hundreds of movies. But my iPad can't handle that. And if I went to buy five new movies on my iTunes and just said, quick, give me five new movies, and they went to go try to own my iPad, well, my iPad would blow up because it couldn't handle five HD movies at three or four gigs each. So they didn't talk about that. They did talk about Photos now is a new service that will sync. They're gonna keep 1,000. They'll sync to all their devices, including Apple TV. They'll sync automatically. Great. I think it's great. I know the people in my life who use iPhoto to use their iPhone for taking photos, they always say, oh, how do I get them back? And I'm like, great. This will just happen. They'll show up in your iPhoto, and you'll be happy.

Jason Atwood: They'll show up on your iPad. They'll show up somewhere else.

Justin Edelstein: They'll show up in your Photos folder in your PC.

Jason Atwood: Also, again, not really a cloud-based thing, but iTunes will sync wirelessly now. So it won't sync through the cloud, but it'll sync. So all your movies and your podcasts and all that will move over via wirelessly when your computer's at home and plugged in and your device is plugged in. So if you have your device in its little cradle at night when you're sleeping, it'll be going back and forth saying, oh, I'll take over the latest podcast, latest episode of Cloud Focus Weekly. It'll come over to your device. That's cool. Other stuff. Well, I guess the other two things that they announced, I didn't think were sort of big ones, But apps, books, and let's leave documents off, but apps and books. So if you buy books on one thing, they're going to sync wirelessly across. OK, great. You buy apps on one device, they're going to sync wirelessly. And then music. If you buy music on one device, they will sync wirelessly. That feature is actually out now. So if you have the latest version of iTunes and the latest version of iOS on your iPad or iPhone or iTouch, you can use that feature now. We actually turned it on. And it allows you to do two cool things.

Jason Atwood: One is that you can actually buy an album on one, literally on your iTunes, and then watch it instantly download to all three devices at the same time. I did it. I held them up. I watched, I re-bought Lady Gaga because iTunes Cloud failed me. And it just, it would come down.

Justin Edelstein: Amazon Cloud failed you.

Jason Atwood: Amazon Cloud failed me. Yeah. It would come down to my iTunes, and then instantly I'd start seeing it sync down to both, not sync, but download again to both my iPad and an iPhone at the same time. It's basically creating three copies, which is what would have happened if I had sunk it. The theory there, I guess, is, listen, if you buy an album, you want to listen to that song, so why should I have to sink it over there? I wonder how they're going to deal with conflicts. Like I just bought an album, it's sunk down to three devices. Now my iTunes is going to sink wirelessly at night. Is it going to know, I assume it's going to know, hey, that's supposed to be over there. Don't take it off.

09:31 Justin Edelstein: Oh, well, it'll be in all three places, so it's not going to take it off.

Jason Atwood: Well, but what happens if I have my iTunes set to never sync music?

Justin Edelstein: Then it probably won't get there in the first place.

Jason Atwood: No, it would, because I'm not, remember, one is telling it when I purchase it, I want to push there. The other one's saying when I sync, what device I want to sync with, or what I want to sync. Or I could say, I only want to sync this one album ever in iTunes, right? I have one album, I've chosen that album, and that's the album I sync back and forth. But then I buy something and it flows down to my iPhone. Where do you buy it? On iTunes.

Justin Edelstein: Then it's not going to flow down. I don't think it would. Oh.

Jason Atwood: Well, these are scenarios that I think that Apple is going to have, I hope, put in a lot of information because we always say syncing is hard. This is some complex stuff through the cloud, through iTunes, through, and then you're basically syncing to two places that are not the same. One is your iTunes library and one is the cloud. It's not the same. So...

Justin Edelstein: I like that you're going to have the physical file on the device. Well, that's... I've always not been a fan of the music streaming service because of the subway.

Jason Atwood: Although you love Pandora more than life.

Justin Edelstein: Different scenario. Pandora, I don't own anything in Pandora. Don't care that I can't get to it on the subway. It's not my music. But if I own music and I'm putting it up somewhere so I can get to it from anywhere, but then I can't get to it in the subway, which is where I listen to music, then I don't appreciate that.

Jason Atwood: This is a great way. It is opposite of what Amazon and Google Music are doing, in that, yes, you're not streaming back your music. So I've started uploading all my music to Google Music just to give it a shot. Thinking about a blog post in the future, about comparing the three. But it failed. Well, no, it's still syncing, and it does take weeks. And this is what Steve said in the announcement, which was, if we're gonna sync all your stuff up, It's going to take a long time. But what Apple's doing differently, and the other two are not, is allowing you to download it. I think what they need to add to it to make it the killer is also stream. Because there's the case where I bought the Lady Gaga album, and I'm sitting here in the office on Wi-Fi. I don't want to have to download it just to listen to it. Let me stream it.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, because I did that yesterday. We were sitting here, and I bought an album at home. And I said, oh, I just bought that album. And I really want to listen to it. And it's not on my iPhone. Darn. And you were like, that feature is actually out now. And I blew your mind. You did. I was like, wow, that's on my phone. Excellent.

Jason Atwood: And it sounded like this.

Justin Edelstein: It did, just like that. So I downloaded the album from the iCloud, which was great. But it did take like 10 to 15 minutes to get down to my device over Wi-Fi. And yesterday I did sort of the same.

Jason Atwood: So if you're on your way to the subway, you would get an album or you get a song. You might get a song.

Justin Edelstein: But I did the same thing yesterday with an app. I have pages. I had bought it originally when it came out for the iPad. So I went on my iPhone and was in the store, because I wanted to update some of my applications. And I went to update them. And then I saw the Purchases tab. So I clicked on it. I was like, oh, look at all these apps that are not on the phone. I just popped pages onto the phone. Not that I'll ever use Pages on the phone, because it's just too small. But it's interesting to get it there.

13:03 Jason Atwood: Well, let's talk about that in a second. Let's finish up the iTunes thing. So iTunes, the new feature, it'll sync everything. As you purchase, it'll download to all your devices. If you have it turned on to those devices, great. The add to that is, OK, well, what happens about all these CDs I've been ripping for 10 years, which I stopped ripping about six years ago. But I'm thinking now, now's the time to start ripping again because Apple's going to put out a product called iTunes Match that for $24.99 a year, perpetual, it will look through your iTunes library. This is basically la-la for those of us who have been following the conversation. It'll look through your iTunes library, upload the IDs of all the music you have, the unique identifiers of all this music, your Milli Vanilli album that you have. And it'll say, listen, we have Milli Vanilli up here. You have Milli Vanilli up there. We don't need you to upload it to allow you access to it, meaning to allow you to send it down to another device, or I'm hoping very soon to stream it. You get access to it.

Jason Atwood: Anything that we don't have, you can upload. But you can have up to 20,000 songs that you didn't buy through iTunes, through the original iTunes, which to this point, I have not not bought things through iTunes in years. So for me, I have about 1,000 songs that I can download right now because I've been buying things for iTunes for so long, but for all those other songs, then they give you the 256 that are higher quality AAC version of it. I don't know if it then replaces the version you have. I doubt it. That would be kind of weird. Or if it just allows you to download it to another device at that new higher res. I don't know.

Justin Edelstein: I wonder if they're going to have. Yeah, I'm going to pay for it because I have music that is in my iTunes from Rip Things and whatnot.

Jason Atwood: Vanelli remix album.

Justin Edelstein: Vanelli comeback remix album. Yep. What's gonna be interesting is how they use that data to expand on their catalog. So I know myself and my girlfriend in particular listens to a lot of indie music. So not a whole lot of music that you might find even in iTunes. She has a lot of albums that aren't in iTunes, and she buys them on vinyl. So when you buy them on vinyl, you get a download, a free download of the album. So instead of trying to find it online, she buys the record, and then instead of buying a CD and ripping it, she buys the record and then downloads the copy that they give you, which is awesome. You have the vinyl, the hard thing you want to listen to on your record player, great. You get the download too, and then that goes into her iTunes. I have a feeling a lot of that stuff's not going to be...

Jason Atwood: 18 million songs.

Justin Edelstein: That'll be the upload piece. I wonder if they will see, wow, look, X amount of people have uploaded this album, or it's been one person uploaded it, so then we got to use it for these other X amount of people. Not sure how they're going to do that. Maybe we should add this to our catalog, and maybe that'll be good for artists.

16:10 Jason Atwood: Well, they don't ... Remember, they don't add things to their catalog. they then would, what they would do is say, this is an artist, this artist is done by this publishing house. Let's go talk to that publishing house. Well, that's what I mean.

Justin Edelstein: We'll, we'll add, this is something of interest for. More than one. Look, more than one person.

Jason Atwood: Or go to this publishing house and say, hey listen, do you know in the last year that 20,000 people have uploaded your song to iTunes? That means they're using iTunes. That means you should be putting your stuff out there, cuz you'd be selling more. So yeah, that's definitely a, you know, I could definitely see that. Yeah, so you would buy it right off, like, day one. I would buy it.

Justin Edelstein: $24.99, I'm already paying $100 for the MobileMe service, which I'm getting for free. So I'm up $75.

Jason Atwood: There you go. Well, four years from now, you'll be even.

Justin Edelstein: Well, I mean, I paid the $100 a year.

Jason Atwood: So it's not like you get that for free. That's true.

Justin Edelstein: You pay for it every year.

Jason Atwood: So then one of the other things that I think is interesting and sort of changes, again, this will lead into what Apple is doing in the cloud versus others are doing. But they're doing documents in the cloud. And not in the way that Jungle Disk does documents, or IDIS does documents, or even Google Apps does documents. They're doing it in a syncing way, meaning I'm sitting in pages, and they're going to release this API for other devices or other applications. I'm sitting in pages on my Mac. I'm typing away, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm making some great document. And I don't have to save it anymore because Lion doesn't me say so I just close out. Instantly that is sent up to the cloud, the changes, and then that pages document is then sent down instantly to my other two devices. I assume that I've told them that I want that to happen. I think that's where it gets a little muddy, like is that for every document, is that for some documents, if I'm working on 300 documents and pages, are they all then sent to all devices? It gets kind of strange. But in theory with with one document, it always looks good. So then on my iPhone where I have pages and on my iPad where I have pages, that document shows up instantly and is there. And if I walk out the house immediately, I can sit and play with it in the cab on the way to our customer. And then as I get there, I open up my laptop and it's back on this one. So what's interesting is it's taking away the thing that all the other cloud computing vendors doing, which is allowing you to access your stuff online. And that's where you do the work. The application is online. Salesforce application is online. Google Apps are online. That's where they are. Yeah, they give you ways to send things down. But basically, if you want to access CRM, you go to salesforce.com. If you want to access your Google Apps, or even your Gmail, I guess email would be the bad example. But it basically is there. That's where you do your work. And so you just need to have access from a browser to do that. Apple's saying, no, there's no even online version of pages. There's no way to do that online.

Jason Atwood: You can do it with the apps you own, and we'll sync it all across. But we're basically using the iCloud as a sync mechanism, not so much as an application mechanism. And I think this is going to the article I wrote, or the blog post. Lisa didn't call it a podcast. I said how Apple helps and hurts with iCloud. And I think the big one for the help is that Apple can take any concept, and they've done this with many concepts, including the iPod, or even the iPad, which if you talk to people about tablet computing and MP3 music players and smartphones, their eyes start rolling in their head. General people, moms, pops, even friends, whatever. You talk to people about iPods, iPads, and iPhones. They have a concept of what that does, and they're excited about it. Whereas those other things sound kind of geeky and stupid. Like a tablet computer, I don't need a tablet computer. Oh, but I want that new iPad. Right?

20:08 Jason Atwood: There's this sense of it. And Apple is a great way of taking these concepts and boiling them down to an iDevice or an iName.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, they put an i in front of something.

Jason Atwood: But they spend millions of dollars on marketing to make it have intrinsic value that you feel about an iPad or an iMac or an iPod came from their millions of dollars of marketing and they do it well enough to make it very simple. They simplify the concept. And I'm excited that they're going to take something that's cloud computing and put it iCloud and make it into this very simple thing so people kind of go, I need that iCloud. It's going to do good stuff for me.

Justin Edelstein: I need the cloud.

Jason Atwood: I need iCloud. In the way, in the flip it around, so it'll give a lot to the cloud computing movement and push it forward in a very consumer-based way, which I think is good. Because consumer-wise, it hasn't been, enterprises, businesses, great, they're getting it.

Justin Edelstein: Or if you just take email out of the equation.

Jason Atwood: But people, if you said, your email's in the cloud, now all my email's on my device. What are you talking about?

Justin Edelstein: Well, now, most people are my emails in my browser. in my browser.

Jason Atwood: But they wouldn't say that's a cloud computer. That's not a virtually hosted environment with one version that is multi-tenancy. They wouldn't say that. And I think this is, again.

Justin Edelstein: DANNY HERMES-DAYLEE:: That's how I usually explain cloud computing to people, by the way. I say, you use it. You use your email. And then I sort of go from there. JONATHAN BERIKE. Go from there. Go backwards. DANNY HERMES-DAYLEE:: Well, like, when I'm at a family event, they're like, oh, how's your business doing? JONATHAN BERIKE. That cloud thing. DANNY HERMES-DAYLEE:: Doing well. What is it that you guys do again? Oh. And I have to explain it. And I start off by,

Jason Atwood: you start off by sighing very loudly. Yes. OK.

Justin Edelstein: Does that help? Sometimes they just leave me alone.

Jason Atwood: I'll have to tell the head of our sales that that's what they do.

Justin Edelstein: And then I start with email. Basically, I'm like, we help companies set up applications. Kind of like your email. You use Gmail, Uncle Ronnie.

Jason Atwood: Is Uncle Ronnie a real person? No. OK.

Justin Edelstein: And then I explain the concepts using email as my big example.

Jason Atwood: And generally what you're talking about, there's an application on the internet that you use that houses data, that that's where you access it, and that's cloud computing. Again, it's not, but it's a way of getting there. Good enough for them. This is where I flip to where I think Apple is hurting this situation, is they're not using the cloud for a way to host applications for you to do stuff, for you to be productive, for you to enter in data, for you to pull out data. They're using the cloud as a big syncing device.

Justin Edelstein: I would tend to disagree with the last statement you made. I think I'm pulling data out of this cloud.

Jason Atwood: You're not pretty sure I am. Can you go to a browser and type in and hit?

Justin Edelstein: I'm pretty sure I'm going to my iPad and saying I want that song, pull data from cloud.

Jason Atwood: You're using a browser to do that?

Justin Edelstein: I'm using an application that talks to the cloud. an application. There is absolutely nothing on the cloud about that.

23:13 Jason Atwood: You're using an app, actually there is, you're using an application to sync data down and it, hold on, and display it and use it in a third party application.

Justin Edelstein: I am pretty sure the folks at Salesforce who wrote the Flex and Adobe Air Toolkit would disagree with you wholeheartedly.

Jason Atwood: They might, but that's not the cloud platform that they go out and talk about. They don't say, you know what you can do with our cloud. You can write all these applications you throw on your desktop that have version numbers, and they have all these different things. No, they talk about you and you access our application. It's one application.

Justin Edelstein: So chat or desktop, not?

Jason Atwood: Chat or desktop, they're off their thing. And chat or desktop, well, I don't know exactly how it works.

Justin Edelstein: Salesforce mobile on my iPhone? Yeah. I mean, I'm just bringing up many examples of this. Yeah, those are. Where applications are back-ended by cloud services.

Jason Atwood: But percentage usage, percentage usage, and their mainstay, the main usage, just like Gmail, the main usage, and I will bet lots of money, that the main usage of Salesforce is through the browser through a login screen.

Justin Edelstein: I am pretty sure the main usage of Salesforce is through their API.

Jason Atwood: Where is the version of iTunes you can log into on a web from a Linux computer and log into iTunes online and access and stream your music?

Justin Edelstein: You just change the conversation.

Jason Atwood: No, I'm saying that they're not providing, unlike the other cloud computing people like Amazon, Google, Salesforce, whatever. It starts with a browser. You can get to it

Justin Edelstein: from the internet. But hold on. But I think that that's a fallacy. No it's not. Well Salesforce will tell you more than 50% of their transactions are through their API, not through somebody clicking around in the browser. Which is to say that, you know, you can push and pull data to this thing in the cloud which is managing all the logic and the services. Yeah, that's part of it. I don't think that I don't think that that's all too different from what Amazon Cloud Services provides.

Jason Atwood: So are you going to be able to get to, so with, for these other cloud computing services you can get to it from different browsers, from different vendors. It doesn't matter if you're using Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE. Well think about, think about Twitter for a second. Hold on, wait a second. You can log in, you can log, Twitter's a good example. You can log into Salesforce and use Salesforce. You can log in and use Google, Google Music. You can log in and use Amazon Cloud Services, all those devices.

Justin Edelstein: I get that completely. So now it doesn't define the fact that I can log in through a browser and use the application does not define the fact that it's a cloud computer.

Jason Atwood: No, but it is one of the powers of the cloud computer.

Justin Edelstein: One of the powers, certainly.

Jason Atwood: It is one of the biggest things that we talk to organizations is you're not hosting applications that need to do certain work. You don't have to worry that you're on iTunes 10.3 to do this. you can just be using your Safari or whatever. That's part of what we talk about in the power of cloud computing. And what I'm saying is that Apple, in the way that they're hurting this a little bit, is they're not doing that. They're using the cloud as a huge syncing device, powerful, data flowing back and forth, great. But they're saying, you gotta be on this version of this thing that we control, that we produce. You gotta be on our device using, and I'm the biggest Mac fan on the planet, well, maybe not the planet, There's probably a few others. I might be top three. But this is the thing that when they start to get into cloud computing, I start to look at it like, oh, OK, interesting. It's locked to your devices. It's locked to your applications on your devices. And there is no other access to it. There's no way to get to iDocuments or syncing up

26:51 Jason Atwood: documents through the browser. Nope. If you're on Linux, no, no. You're not using it. You can use Google Music on Linux. Fine. Stream your music. Listen to it all you want. You can use Pandora. Or you can use, they have a web-based version of it. Apple is basically using the cloud in this mega center down in North Carolina as a massive data-syncing mechanism between their devices and applications that they control, which you need to have the right versions of to do. Which is very, it's not coinciding with most of what cloud computing is doing. It's making it not application-specific, not locked into platforms, not locked into certain devices, right? That's my point.

Justin Edelstein: OK. I mean, I disagree with some of the statements that you make, and I've already said why I believe it.

Jason Atwood: Do you understand that it is a locked cloud? Sure, it is.

Justin Edelstein: It's locked into Apple devices that run certain software on those devices, which will, in the future, be updated over the air. So you won't have to necessarily worry about that. But I don't see, it's not necessarily a false cloud. It is up there. I never said false cloud. It is working in a way that a lot of other cloud computing platforms work. It has an API. It will allow other applications to talk to it. And it will do what it does. Right.

Jason Atwood: But it's locked into devices and specific applications. Not even one specific. You could say that Salesforce is locked into one specific application, the browser, and that there are versions of the browser they support. And they don't support every browser, so you can't use Netscape .19 or .91, and you can't use Google Chrome or IE5 or IE6, maybe not IE7, IE6. So you could say that they are locked into one thing. But beyond that browser, which we're trying to say, which what COD computing likes to say is the browser is pretty ubiquitous, a $600 iPhone running the latest version of the iOS, running pages, which is a $699 application, that's pretty specific. That's not open. That's not an open platform. That's a very closed platform. Again, huge Apple app find boy. Love it. Can't wait to use it. And I like that they're doing the things that others aren't doing, which is the syncing, Because I think syncing makes the cloud stuff even better in that, again, music is with me, not just something I can get to if I can get to the internet. But anyway, so that's what I was talking about how it hurts and helps in the blog post. I think we've said much more here than I did in the blog post, but if you want to read the blog post, it's at blog.arkasync.com. All right, so we beat the cloud to the death. Anything else about the iCloud announcements? There's so much.

Justin Edelstein: There's some cool stuff with the iOS, more specifically that they're tightly integrating Twitter into the OS, which is going to be interesting. I mean, it's also interesting. They didn't do Facebook, but they did Twitter.

29:56 Jason Atwood: So a rumor, hold on, a rumor came out today that they showed, someone was looking at the new beta release of iOS, and they found lots of hooks for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace.

Justin Edelstein: So they're definitely going to go social with this phone and allow you to, you from really anywhere. Like the browser, there's like a built-in tweet this, things that you could have hacked around and used like JavaScript bookmarks to do.

Jason Atwood: Basically, you're going to authenticate at the OS level.

Justin Edelstein: And all apps can essentially then tie to that and use that. Speaking of social, let's move to our next topic, which is Dreamforce 11 and the announcement of industry visionaries from across the social spectrum. I watched the Cloudforce Washington DC keynote. And a lot of it, I watched it live streaming on the internet.

Jason Atwood: Did you have to use some sort of specific device to get it?

Justin Edelstein: No, but it was a little clunky. It was skipping a lot. I guess a lot of people were watching it. They had two channels, too, and I was jumping between them. But a lot of it was really about shifting gears and moving to this social enterprise. Benioff, Mr. Mark Benioff, was talking a lot about social. And it makes sense. They've rolled out a social platform, a collaboration

Jason Atwood: platform, Chatter. I've heard of this. Yes.

Justin Edelstein: And they have the agreement with Toyota to build the social network, if you will. And now they've purchased Radian 6, and they integrate Seesmic so they have a lot of things social going on and I think they are trying to be the visionaries for what is a social enterprise. They're gonna be doing a whole track at Dreamforce and they have some of our favorites. Gary Vanerchuk will be speaking during the social enterprise track, the social roadmap if you will. So they're gonna have a social roadmap that helps you kick off your social strategy. Get inspiration for how to turn your enterprise into an enterprise that leverages social platforms, how to do this, how you might want to go about it, how you might want to map it out, and then I assume here's some technologies to help you out, right? Here's Twitter and Facebook for Salesforce. Here's Radian6. Here's Chatter. Here's

Jason Atwood: this. Let me throw it to the rumor mill. So Facebook and Twitter integration right now are downloadable AppExchange products, correct? Correct. Would you say rumor mill is that in the next release, in the fall release, or they call it the winter release in the fall, that that will no longer be the case, that they will be absolutely included in? Because it seems to me the big, the big jump is we have a lot of experience of installing applications and there are some good ones and there's some bad ones and there can be some real downsides of of installing stuff that's managed or not managed, and stuff can happen, just like installing any application. But I'm waiting for them to say, just like Apple just did with iOS, say this is no longer something you can add. This is a core part. We are going to integrate Facebook and Twitter directly into Salesforce from the get.

33:21 Justin Edelstein: My take is that it should be, a lot like Jigsaw. It took them a while, but Jigsaw went from an App Exchange application that you would install to now in this newest Summer 11 release being GA. There's a Jigsaw tab in your Salesforce. Open it up, you'll see the Jigsaw tab. And get some licenses. Yeah. But essentially, I feel like it should be. I mean, they're on version four of this thing. The hard part is likely the people who are using it now as the installed package, how do we get them from that to this new because I would assume they would change some things probably if it was part of the core platform. How do we get people from one to the other? That could probably be a challenge but you know they keep upgrading. They're on like I said version 4 of the Salesforce for Twitter. Version 4 now includes Facebook and it really should be part of the core. You shouldn't have to go to the App Exchange and download a package to get this and go through a configuration and get this whole thing to work. It should sort of be set up and you should certainly have to configure it to do what you need it to do, but it should be a little easier than that and it really should be part of the really part of the platforms that you get support on it, so that you know if something's not working it's Salesforce's problem not yours for installing something that's unsupported or free that a lot of the time they don't support. That's my take on it. I'm excited about this new social roadmap track at Dreamforce. I'm really excited to see Gary Vaynerchuk in particular. I'm also excited to see Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States of America. That's kind of cool. Which is pretty awesome. He's the guy who, you know, when Obama came into office, he came in with them and said, government agencies, if you want to build apps you must look at the cloud first and give me an excuse for why you're not using it otherwise I'm not funding you so that is pretty neat pretty cool and I think Obama has one of the more interesting social strategies for a candidate of anyone out there and I'm sure mr. Kundra had something to do

Jason Atwood: with that in fact we just had a colleague of ours move over to help out his Salesforce stuff. Not a colleague. Not a colleague. A peer. A peer of ours was hired to help run his Salesforce stuff. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I'm very excited. Gary Vee is, you know, I heard about him years and years ago as I started watching video podcasts and he was, I'm not saying the first video podcast. They had him on Dignation. That's where I heard of him. They had him on Dignation a lot. But he became a big social thing. I've now both of his books. I will say I'm not-

Justin Edelstein: I'm not crushing it and I didn't, I stopped reading the Thank You Economy. Thank You Economy. Because it just seemed repetitive for me.

36:24 Jason Atwood: He has a deal to write eight books.

Justin Edelstein: Wow, they're all going to be the same.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, and I'm kind of figuring, and sorry Gary Vee, if we meet at Dreamforce, this is Justin talking, I kind of feel like he should have written like, he should have like made a deal for like three books and because those first two, if you merge them together, they would have been one book.

Justin Edelstein: Well, I read the first one on an iPad app called a Vook, which was very interesting. Don't swear at me. I'm not. All right. It was like Gary Vee videos embedded inside of this book that you're reading. It's an app. And that was cool because he's super energetic and just reading him in his voice and his energy and then watching a video, you get that voice in your head, his energy, and it sort of rolls and you get to read the book that way. He's definitely going to be an extremely good speaker. I've watched some of his speeches or talks online. He's really energetic. He curses.

Jason Atwood: Yes. He does. Not like this podcast. His podcast should all be. And he's big into podcasting and blogging and social. You know, again, not that I'm apparently going to get hit when I say I'm going to see a big guy.

Justin Edelstein: He doesn't seem that big.

Jason Atwood: But I will say, I subscribe to his couples podcast, and they never get updated. Like his video podcast never, not the wine TV one, the wine TV one's fine. But the other one's about his talks, and he gets on his little moments, they never get updated, they never come down in his video, his podcast, so it kinda disappoints me. I liked his first book, I thought his second book was good. They could have been combined in one book, I feel, and been, I guess, excellent. But can't wait to hear him speak. And hopefully we can get away from our booth long enough, Because we're in the process of picking our booth space for Dream Force 11, which is kind of fun. So those of you who are listening and fans of the Arcus and going to Dream Force, we will be somewhere.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe we'll have the snowball. Maybe we'll have the snowball. That's how you'll know. If the snowball's the mic, maybe we'll have it out. Maybe we'll do some podcasting from the floor.

Jason Atwood: I think we might try to do that.

Justin Edelstein: We might need a noise filter.

Jason Atwood: And then the last thing, which we could cover, let's cover now quickly, because I think probably someone's going to blog about it soon.

Justin Edelstein: I will probably blog about this soon.

Jason Atwood: probably recover it once everybody has a version but this will be a sneak

Justin Edelstein: preview for a blog post that I haven't written there you go so summer 11 is

Jason Atwood: it's coming out it's out in our org it's out in our Oregon's our kiss org so what's give me two favorite oh I picked four off to the way I put four in the Google in the Google Wave I vote for I will read the other two well fine I will

Justin Edelstein: take the first two that I wrote because those are my two favorites first favorite Chatter Favorites! This is a great feature. So if you click on a chatter topic or if you do a search and you're in the chatter feed search results you can bookmark that or favorite it and then that favorite will show up on your on the chatter tab on the left as one of your favorites and you can always go back there click it and it'll rerun the search it's sort of like a saved search for you and it'll bring back results in real time of that topic or that search string that you put in there and I think that's a great idea. I love it. That's that is a good idea. I love that. I've always been a fan of like saved search or like RSS feeds of searches so that's sort of what this is. I really like it. My second favorite feature is the report builder got some upgrades so a few

40:05 Justin Edelstein: things about the report builder I'll just mention one thing that I really liked which was the ability to add specifically add and remove multiple columns or fields at one time. It used to really bother me that I couldn't just grab like six fields and drag them onto the report. Now you can do that and you You can also move them around multiples, move them around, drag them around the columns. So it makes that a lot better. It also, just to tack on a small little other thing about the Report Builder, loads a lot faster. So it's doing the preview thing sort of in a different sort of asynchronously. That's not affecting the rest of the page. So some good stuff there.

Jason Atwood: All right, I would say two. I'm going to pick two, one that you picked, which I haven't started using because I'm still not used to it being available, which is the quick find in setup. So now there's a little find search thing in setup area. And you can start typing, and it'll basically rebuild the navigation with the term that you're searching for, which is great because we're sales force consultants, and we deal with this stuff almost every single day of our life. We know where things are, but there are times when you're like, is that under this tab, or this tab, or that tab?

Justin Edelstein: company information or is that under data storage?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it looks and it's really well done. I really love it. The other one that I would put out that's not on your list is Chatter, let's call it Chatter, it's not Chatterlytics, but it's Chatter profile stats, which is now on the profile page right underneath your name, you have how many posts and comments you have, how many comments received, and how many likes received. So a little bit more of the social networking thing, which actually isn't even really in things like Facebook. You have that in Twitter, you can see how many I've posted, how many friends, whatever. But this is sort of- How many lists you're in. Yeah, so this kind of gives you a little view. I wish there were a bit more in reporting, I wish I could sort of show everybody, show everybody's thing, but it's kind of neat, kind of shows up underneath your little picture. And then I'm actually going to do a tip of the hat, wave of the finger, which is a Corbeira report thing for the Corbeira phones, you know, Stephen Corbeira.

Jason Atwood: So he does tip of the hat and then wave of the finger. Tip of the hat is a good thing, wave of the finger is a bad thing. So they announced that they put in a new feature, which is the unresolved items link that is right now under your shortcuts. You've always been able to add a shortcut to your calendar on the side and then side navigation. And as of summer 11, something else shows up there, which is unresolved items. And it's this little icon of a sort of a warning hazard icon that you would see if someone were stranded.

Justin Edelstein: Or if someone was building their website in 1996 and it was under construction.

Jason Atwood: A little guy with a little digger thing. If you got animated one, that was good. And then it says unresolved items. And I first logged in and it actually had, it's similar to the one that showed up in the My Tasks list last release. says unresolved tasks, or unresolved emails. Apparently, that was too low and too out of our face. And so they decided to put it up really in our face. Shortcuts right there, unresolved items. Great. I clicked on it. I found some of my unresolved items. I found a couple emails I hadn't associated because I was using email to Salesforce. And I was like, great. That's great. I can't wait to see that. So I checked them all. There's three tabs in there. I was gone. I came back to the home page. And it's still there with this little icon that looks like there's something really bad going on. I'm like, oh man, maybe I missed something. Click on it again, go to the three tabs, nothing there. Maybe I got to log out. I log out, log back in, still there. It's always there. It's not there based on whether there's actually unresolved items.

44:00 Jason Atwood: Whoever in the user testing should have pointed out that when you have something that's a warning sign that says there are unresolved items under a link, there better be unresolved items under that link. That is bad, bad UI design. Bad, bad people. Love Salesforce, bad UI design. Already put up an idea exchange on it. Find it. It's actually the one that's from the other one. I might just change it to include that one. Because it's the same on the task list. It just said unresolved emails. And you click on it.

Justin Edelstein: I was there in the last release. So you must not have noticed it then. No, I did.

Jason Atwood: I put in an idea exchange to remove it.

Justin Edelstein: Get rid of it when there's nothing in it. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: But this one's worse because it's more in your face, it's in a place that's more prominent, and it has an icon that makes it look like there's something bad going on. So that's it. So that's a few. We'll talk about them more. There's a bunch of others. We'll talk about them in a, we might do a full podcast on it, maybe the week after next. But for now, let's get on to our Cloud Focus App Picks of the Week. So quickly, because we've taken about 45 minutes to talk.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, we should do this fast then. All right. the Inforce connector by RedKite, folks at RedKite who we know, they built a, this is actually I don't think it's new, it's fairly new, a LinkedIn connector that brings in, sort of reads in the LinkedIn data into a Visualforce component that you can put on a page layout. So when you're looking at a contact, it allows you to find that contact inside of LinkedIn. You connect it and then once it's connected, every time you look at that contact within Salesforce, you see their LinkedIn profile within a section. Really neat, free. Just installed it for one of our clients the other day who wanted to see LinkedIn data on the page and I said, all right, I think there's a product out there for this. I went and found it on the AppExchange, tested it a little bit, worked really well, installed it, works great.

Justin Edelstein: Great. Find it on the AppExchange. Free, free, free. Free for all.

Jason Atwood: I had two picks, I'm just going to do one quickly because it's running out of time. Wonderful. And I'll pick the free one. I'm not going to pick the one that I'm watching someone else use.

Justin Edelstein: So not the one that's on the Google Wave. Not the one that's on the Google Wave. I'm going to pick another one.

Jason Atwood: See, you could have used it then, but we've already used it. Yeah, I'll save that. I'm going to use the, have you heard about this one? I don't know. It's not on the Wave. Google Chrome extension called the salesforce.com ID Clipper. The ID Clipper?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, isn't that the one that takes like 15 character IDs and or 18

Jason Atwood: character IDs and clips them down to 15 or something like that? Absolutely not. It's a little ID Clipper that's a Google Chrome extension that when you're in Salesforce and it knows when you're logged in Salesforce and you're on an ID, so on something that has a Salesforce ID, it puts a little, next to the star where you can bookmark, it puts a little quipper thing and then you can click on it. I think they have it, there's an extent, there's a key command for it and it'll basically just copy just the ID so then you can go use it somewhere else. That's useful. Very useful. It's free, it's by, I think it's GoKubi. GoKubi? GoKubi, who is, I know is.

47:20 Justin Edelstein: He's connected to the, oh. If people? No. His real name is, I can't remember if that's Steve Anderson or not, but he's a developer for the Salesforce Foundation. Oh, OK.

Jason Atwood: No, not. Oh, OK.

Justin Edelstein: If it's Gokubi, then that's who it is. OK.

Jason Atwood: So I think Gokubi, OK. We'll have to go back, but I think he's also been involved in palm work. Rings a bell, but maybe not. Anyway, Salesforce ID Clipper by Gokubi, free, free, free, and good stuff. So that about wraps up our Cloud Focus podcast of the week. Again, I already talked about blog.arcasync.com, where you can find the article, not as much commentary as you'll find on the podcast. But if you want to hear some more of our podcasting, go to iTunes, where you can subscribe to the Cloud Focus Weekly podcast and leave a review there. That would be great. We're also on Facebook, facebook.com slash arcasync. And then the company is at twitter.com slash arcasync. I'm at twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. And Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein. All of which can be found on the blog, all of which can be found in all the other social networks, or even on LinkedIn, but it's some weird URL that you can't find. So, until next week, until I guess we talk to you again and maybe we'll have more news and more summer release and other things to talk about. Enjoy those eye cloudy days.