Amazon Chatter Monkey - Episode #83 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 83rd episode of CloudBooks Weekly for the fourth week of March 2012. This episode is titled Amazon Chatter Monkey. Wow. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, you're a cloud computing expert. Wow. I'm your host Jason Atwood, joining me is the co-hosts who's wowing it up,

Justin Edelstein: Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today? You know, I created the Google Doc for the agenda for this show and I left the title out and then I didn't look at it until you just said it. That was a good title. That's not bad.

Jason Atwood: It's sort of my talent. Yeah Got it. Got it. All right. Well, you'll understand it pretty quickly because we have an agenda. We do. We're going to talk about our blog post this week at blog.arcasinc.com. Talking about chatter approvals. Yeah. It should be up in the time of this, hopefully in the time of this recording. Or the time of the year listening. The recording's happening. And we also are going to talk about, I can't even pronounce the name. I'm not even going to try. So I'm coming to that bot dryer something. Zynga. Zynga. I look at it and I want to say one thing. You can't read it. It's all there. Zynga. Yep. And then we got some Google Map News and then we got an article on Digital Cloud gobbling to my hotel the USA Today app.

Jason Atwood: All right, so first things off is the newest blog post about chatter approvals. Basically a quick little review of the functionality of a chatter approvals for all of you out there who are absolutely new to the 83rd episode here. Chatter is a collaboration tool built into salesforce.com. salesforce.com is a CRM application amongst everything else in platform. And chatter approvals is the ability to add the approval process, doing the approvals, which used to be in its own interface, or is still in its own interface, but now you can do it also in chatter. So inline in chatter, you can see the approval and approve it right from chatter. And that's really what the blog post about. and gives it a rating which I won't say. The blogger was really wanted to give it a grade.

Jason Atwood: So gave it a grade and offers some suggestions for future functionality. Yeah,

Justin Edelstein: I have some additions to his or improving approvals. That's a tough one. Zinga?

04:54 Jason Atwood: I got our apps. It's not there. Yeah, I don't have that.

Justin Edelstein: Someone let us turn that on.

Jason Atwood: It I don't know. So anyway, but chatter approvals. What's interesting, I think more than just chatter approvals and its features are not features s s

Justin Edelstein: Like the speed of the internet now, this company that launched this omg pop, Well you have the attention span of a fly. 10.8 million active users.

Jason Atwood: And the That's what it has.

08:01 Justin Edelstein: It's that tie to Facebook. That's 200 million dollars worth totally totally worth 200 million That's it.

Jason Atwood: That's just crazy. Actually, it's a great game. You should try it. They have some new features coming out. I read an article. I think I tweeted it or sent it to you. You sent it to me. You may have tweeted it. And, there's lots of, you know, it's one of those things that just catches on and yeah, it kind of has a bubble and then sort of people will either continue playing it. I think it needs competition. Like, you're playing with the person to win, but it needs competition. Like, You need to have something that you're competing with the other person about. Yeah, there's no winner. No, we're loser No, you're just playing you're just playing which is a little bit in the game. I like that you're playing together Yeah, lots of actual it's actually been hitting a lot of different pieces that the core of the Google Maps news You know Google Maps being just come they Google I think bought it a company They've integrated it so well and everything they do then they open up the API's and they say listen use it wherever you want Use it so a lot of companies like Fours, Square, and StreetEasy, and even Apple built it into their applications, used the APIs, rendered the little tiles.

Jason Atwood: Well, as of I think last October, Google announced that they're going to start charging for it. They haven't charged anybody yet, by the way. We will get you hooked, and then we will charge you. Right. A drug dealer. Right. I'd charge you for that GPS or that Google tiles. And so some companies have been making some changes. And the first one that I saw pretty quickly was Foursome changed their mapping engine to I think an open source mapping project. Then Apple changed theirs not on the iPhone. Fours a changed, changed theirs to a product called OpenStreet Map. Yeah, I think that's what everybody's going. So it's kind of interesting. What is it now? It's using the same technology. Oh, no kidding. And then another one did it. Oh, StreetEasy. They went and built their own.

Jason Atwood: And what they were saying was that they thought, They built their own? Well, they used this, but they built their own maps on top of it. Well, here's why. They're only focused on certain areas of the country. Right. So their thing to Google was, great, you're going to charge for maps. But I just want New York. Give me New York and DC. I don't need Kansas because my application I need to do is here. And there's an interesting article that they put out saying they were also able to put in more information because they're focusing just on this area. So like express stops and things like that on subways and things that Google wasn't focusing in on because Google was trying to get the world stuff. things like Street View.

11:37 Justin Edelstein: That's hard to reproduce right? Yeah, you gotta have a big time money and infrastructure to do that and Speaking of Street View. Well, I was gonna stay on this for one minute. I was gonna ask you a question Okay question cuz I don't know does Apple Sticking with Apple for a moment. So the the maps Application on your iOS device. Yes is a Google Maps app. Yes So, I presume that's written by Apple, that uses Google's front end, uses Google's back end, a Mac. So, are they paying for that?

Jason Atwood: I presume they are. No. No one has... Google has not charged anybody yet. Really? Google said we are going to charge. So, I think it's a, now it's an everybody getting off the ship kind of situation. That's a big deal. Yeah. And it's like again, it's gonna scale high but You gotta figure they gotta make money on it. I get that. I wish they would have just said from the beginning it's this As opposed to it's free because free does something changes Also, once you're paying for something then I kind of want you know, I want more I want support. I want to be able to call 1-800-GOO RULEMAPS and get support on my maps. That's true. So, interesting. You know, Google certainly, I don't know if this fits under their do-no-evil thing, but it's an interesting way of looking at the world.

Jason Atwood: Speaking of interesting ways of looking at the world I'm looking at the world right now in a

Justin Edelstein: Very interesting way So tell me about the next story I am taking a tour of a river in the Amazon rainforest I think this is called the Black River Go on? Google Street View has made its way to the Amazon rainforest Nice through a partnership with I really wish I knew who was with the partnership hold on a second let me pull this up here They had a partnership with a nonprofit organization called the foundation for a Susciszt Amazon to map a small small of The massive Rio Negro the Black River. Mm-hmm, which is pretty Darn cool. I am looking at it right now and I'm traveling up this river via street view, I guess they just took a little boat and Made their way up this river. Yeah here. Look you can see the the Wake the wake behind the boat pretty interesting This is this is an example of the reach that Google has that That you wouldn't expect You know the the competition to be able to actually compete with, right?

Justin Edelstein: If you needed to embed Street View over the end, I do. You're not gonna be able to do it with OpenStreetMap for a while, I bet. Yeah, you know, it's true.

Jason Atwood: I'm actually more impressed. I mean, that's interesting. I like the concept of it. But I'm kinda more interested in the... that there is an open source mapping product out there that sort of people have already been contributing to. And if you think about Wikipedia, sort of its ability to kill off encyclopedia, in fact that could be another piece of news, is that Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer gonna do a print. Why didn't we do that? Well we just did. We just did.

15:03 Justin Edelstein: Because you're traveling up this river right now. I know, you're going up the river.

Jason Atwood: So, you know, but that's interesting. Here's an open source sort of website that's cloud source data is now killing off one of the most oldest and venerable. Couple hundred years. Yeah, of printed, they're gonna stay on the web. But it's, you know, these things happen.A it's kind of like looking at a... you something like Zagit. The Zagit Guide in New York City used to be like the big thing. What's the Zagit rating? I could care less what the Zagit rating is anymore. Really? Yeah, I go to Yelp, I go to something else, and I look, and that's it. Is that like like Nielsen ratings? and stuff? Yeah, it just doesn't matter anymore. Like, crowdsourcing of data is so much more important. You know then then what then what these little surveys they gave to 20 people?

Jason Atwood: You know did they stay on top of the time so? Interesting interesting with the street the rainforest Amazon rainforest Street View actually when you wrote it I thought it was that there's Amazon calm. I was like sure why would Amazon calm be doing Street View? Which brings us to another story. Again, this is the USA Today article about, it's called Digital Cloud Gobbles Up CDs, Music, and Books. Yeah, I'd open this up. This is for anybody who has sort of been asleep at the wheel for the last five or six,

Justin Edelstein: Well, I guess three or four, five, six years. I have a good story to support this. Go ahead. I don't even know what this is about. Oh, it's... I imagine this supports it. Here it is.

Jason Atwood: The story is, for anybody out there, that the idea that people buy physical media anymore, people don't want to. From gaming systems now to software, to books, Kindle, iBooks, to music, to videos. I would say, even with the announcement of the new, of being able to re-download movies on iTunes. to Makes me want to buy CDs even less. It's like yeah, okay You keep a copy and I'll get it when I when I want it whenever I want it so See what's your story about it was?

Justin Edelstein: I was sitting yesterday in my girlfriend's apartments and Go on go on and we had just finished watching the finale of season 2's Walking Dead I heard it was good the finale was excellent I have not watched any of it so this is not a TV critic show but the season got better as it went on and the end was really good And it made her just out of nowhere yesterday say to me, she's like, now I want to read the comics. And I was like, oh, that's all right. You know what? I could, I would kind of want to read them. It's kind of a good show and it's based on these comics or whatever they're called. Novel, what are they called? problem. People who are like into it are like, they're not comics!

18:04 Jason Atwood: They're something else. No, they're something books. They're like, yeah, I don't know,

Justin Edelstein: Trades or something. No, they call them something novels. Novellas? No, like an image novel or, I don't know, who the hell cares? So anyway, she said to me, I wanna read the comic. I said, oh, it's great. She's like, yeah, I wanna go buy it. I'm like. You can buy it right now. She goes, what do you mean? I'm like, your iPad's sitting on your table right in front of you. She's like, oh, that's a good idea. So she finds like four different places she can buy it. She could get it in iBooks. She can download the Walking Dead app. She can download some other comic comic X So comic X that's the one she went with yep, they had good reviews and it had it for the cheapest it was like $5.99 for the first volume.

Justin Edelstein: Like iBooks had it for like $8.99. So she goes in, she downloads it, and in about four minutes, she downloaded the app and the first volume, and it's sitting there and she's reading it. And I'm like, how cool is that? And she's like. Yeah, that was kinda cool. And this is a person who's like, I can't wait to get all my CDs out of storage and display them, and has like all these records and like is into physical media, has a huge bookshelf of books. I'm surprised that she actually went for it and was like, alright, it might have been like an impulse thing, like I want it, now. Oh wow, I have it now. Cool. And not like wait for it to come from Amazon and then like maybe you wanna read it, maybe you don't.

Jason Atwood: Graphic novel. That's. All right, just popped in my head. was a big deal. Books and libraries used to be a big thing. I mean way back in history like you, you were and then records and then CDs and how many times you walk in someone's apartment and have all their DVDs out. DVDs were huge. The DVD collection was huge. I have spent four to five hundred dollars on things I only watch once. I used to have tons of CDs I didn't even open. I never even opened them up. And it's totally a shift. I hear more and more people say I don't want the physical media. I don't want it. you It's digital. I want it digitally and I want to consume it and then I don't I might want to consume it again But I don't want to consume it every time.

Jason Atwood: I have not purchased a CD

Justin Edelstein: Or a DVD or blu-ray I don't even have here. Here's the thing. I don't even have Machines that play these things. I have a laptop which I guess I can play a DVD or a CD on not for long Yeah, like I don't have in my apartment I have a nice big HDTV but I do not have a DTVD player I have a stereo but I do not have a CD player like that's for the TV I have a record player which is interesting but I think records are coming back that's my that's my that's my that my opinion is people We'll continue to buy vinyl for the sound quality and get the free digital download that comes with it and have that on the go and have the vinyl cut.

21:41 Jason Atwood: That's just my thing. Go, go, just Google,

Justin Edelstein: Google the vinyl sales and it's like... I'm sure they're up from the 90s. A plummet. I bet they're... No. Well, it's a plummet from the 70s but I bet they're up since the year 2000. I bet they're up. That's just my guess take that I know that we'll take that as a side, but but honestly I look in my apartment I have no Way to play physical media. I have an Apple TV plugged into my TV I can listen to all my music through my stereo via my Apple TV. I could watch all those TV shows and everything through Netflix streaming and all that I If I bought a DVD, I'd literally have nowhere to play it. I'd have to like rip it in my laptop and convert it to some digital thing that I can Play on my TV.

Justin Edelstein: So I don't even have the I don't even have the machinery to play physical media anymore And it's it's only getting worse and I think of I

Jason Atwood: Think of the only getting better my friend Well better for I think better for the people who want to go digital I personally, I start to struggle when I think about a new season coming up, I think about where I'm gonna watch it I start to do that like calculation in my head. All right, can I watch it on? I can watch it if I T-vo it, I can go to On Demand, I can T-vo it, I can give it, then I think I can go over here, then a year later I can go here, then maybe it goes on streaming, and but I love that I've always options. But really, if price weren't a thing, I would want to watch it on Apple TV. Like, if you said there's no price differential between watching it on cable, Apple TV, streaming on Netflix, Hulu, or getting a DVD or Blu-ray in your house, I would say, give me Apple TV every time.

Jason Atwood: Give me no commercials, give me back to back, give me streaming to any device I want at any time, give me the ability to put it on a device so I can take it with me. It's like the best of both worlds.

Justin Edelstein: It's most expensive. You know what Apple TV doesn't have? What? And maybe it's in the, maybe they added it in the new upgrade, but I don't think they did. So what DVDs have, and I know this because my girlfriend and I fall asleep to... Should we rename this episode to like, my girlfriend and I? Justin has a girlfriend? is you can put a disc in and hit the play all button. And it will just play them. So when you're falling asleep to something, listen, you can't do that on the Apple TV. You can go to a season and hit play on an episode, but then when the episode's done, it's over. And you have to like, go in and go to the next episode. If you want to truly just go back to back, round robin, The DVD actually still has that you're laughing at me the DVD actually is the most ridiculous use case And it's a feature.

24:44 Justin Edelstein: It's not a feature. That's a feature play all I have a disc it has three episodes on it I want to watch all three in a row. I hit it once it plays That's a good feature TV should do that wouldn't you like that if you were if you were like oh, I've got like You know, I've got a season. I want to watch all three of these.

Jason Atwood: I want to hit play I mean I get what you're saying and I do hit I do you do have to end and then go back and hit play again It does take two clicks of the thing and yeah.

Justin Edelstein: But if you're fought if your goals to like just have something No, no, no, no, so mom no, no, that's the problem anyway you can most people

Jason Atwood: Know that something on the TV no no so again I I can't wait I mean if someone gave me a lot of money and and I weren't to put it in other places like education or you know a mortgage or something I would love just to have unlimited... What's this education thing? Unlimited iTunes, because that experience of just going quick go, quick go, and I'm wherever I am. I was on, the other day I wanted to try out the new iPad, so I literally just went back into movies and downloaded Toy Story 3, because it was, I had already purchased it, obviously for the kid, so I hit redownload, comes down and I'm watching it. How long did it take? It was actually pretty slow. I think I've been having, I think I've been having network issues.

Jason Atwood: I think you had too. you. Have you been having network issues?

Justin Edelstein: No, but I think you have. Oh, OK. Because I've video chatted with you Cuz I've video chatted with you this morning and it didn't go very well. Oh, OK.

Jason Atwood: All right, well, I think that about wraps it up. Want to mention this last thing or no? Yeah, we'll mention next week. Next week. Next week. Because it's more relevant next week. More relevant next week. So let's talk about our CloudFocus App Picks of the Week. All righty. As we had many rat holes. The rat hole, so... Mine... is Sleep Apnea Mask. Apnea Mask. So mine is, it ties into a theme. I'm surprised it wasn't Comic-X, but anyway. No, no. No, I didn't download it. Oh, by the way, I want to say the one thing cool about Comic-X that is cooler than reading a real magazine, a real trade, a real graphic novel. Graphic novel. that it goes from, you can set it to every touch of the screen. goes from panel to panel and it reads you through the story panel to panel.

Jason Atwood: I saw that little thing.

Justin Edelstein: It's very cool because it's the creative. She was reading it last night and she's like, I've never really read these, I have to not just read the words. Because like you'll look at a page and there'll be like seven panels on the page and only one of them's got words. And like your mind, you're like, alright, let me just move on. But no, no, you should like look at it. I mean, I'm not a graphic novel reader.

Jason Atwood: That's why Comic-X does it better because it actually put that on. Because it goes from panel to panel, so you look and then you go to the next panel. So it like leads you through almost like a very slow motion movie. Alright, sorry, what's your pick? My pick?

27:46 Justin Edelstein: Piggybacks off of our Amazon Rainforest Street View pick. And it's called BrazilQuest for iOS. It's a mobile app. And the reason why I brought this one up is because I was reading an article about the 2014 World Cup, which is 27 months from now. In Brazil, yes. In Brazil. Yes. Yes. and they're already starting the mobile and social marketing aspects already. This game, Brazil Quest, is meant as a way for people to familiarize themselves with the 12 host cities in Brazil. So like you get to know what the different cities are and there's like there's like a tour guide like a tourist thing in there. The game is... whatever, it's kind of like Mario Brothers sort of, you just like run and jump and collect coins and things. The game's nothing special. I thought the concept was cooler, because A, they put out this game, they're putting out a YouTube channel to lead up, and this is 27 months away, they're really gearing up.

Justin Edelstein: So I... It makes me think like, aren't the Olympics this year? Are they missing out on something? Like aren't the Olympics like a big deal? They used to be internationally. Shouldn't they be on this mobile games, social? Like shouldn't they be all over this? Or at least NBC here in the United States who covers it? Like shouldn't they be all over this? I thought they were way ahead of themselves and it's a great idea to get out there fast. They were doing a competition. Today in Times Square where our office is on 45th and Broadway Right down the block from us, you know, they had the they have the big screen there. Yep People were playing it on the big screen. Okay, and for a chance to win a trip down Oh, that's cool. So like they've kicked off the marketing efforts for something two years from now using mobile games and social.

Jason Atwood: I thought that was just an interesting way to go about it. It is. That's very cool. Very cool game. Brazil Quest for iOS, I assume is free.

Justin Edelstein: Free. It's not a great game. I just wanted to bring it up as a concept.

Jason Atwood: I will say that the thing that I look back at the Olympics, which used to be a big deal to me... the bringing it every two years I think has been a horrible

Justin Edelstein: Yeah bad decision yeah do it every four and give us both of them in the same year we can handle it make it the year of the Olympics and you get kind of geared up for it I mean I like the summer better than the winter so I'm looking forward to the summer Olympics here because I like basketball and I like the swimming I like all that stuff better than like I don't know the winter sports to me are boring yeah but they they're missing out there's there's a lot there like they should be doing something now and I haven't heard and now I'm hearing something about the world cup 27 months in advance like the Olympics should be doing something and I should have really heard about it already. Yeah, no, I totally totally agree.

30:50 Jason Atwood: All right, well, I'm gonna make my pick something called, I feel like I've used this before. This is one of these things that was really... You're doing a Justin pick? No. I may have used this. No, no, no. It looks cool. This is something that like three or four years ago I downloaded and installed. I then heard about again, I'm like, oh, that's so cool. around your web app. So, you know how in, you have all these apps, but now I built an app called Google Docs, it's my Google Docs app, and what it does is it automatically just sends me right into an URL. It makes it something that shows up in my doc as its own app. It should actually be putting R in a little icon, creates its own thing for the app.

Jason Atwood: So for people who use Salesforce a lot, you could create a Salesforce app, or a production Salesforce app, or another app. And it would use Safari as the background for the browser. But it makes them little apps in your docs, so you don't kill, you know, Safari by mistake, can kill off 10 tabs because it is its own app. It has its own name and it sits in a.................. and you should check it out. I've seen other people use it, I've forgotten it, I go back to it, I'm so used to using my browsers and tabs, but it