Written by Alessandro on 15 Mar 2010 — Tagged with: chatter, collaboration, ideas

“New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive”.

via The Facebook Imperative.

We’ve been using Salesforce.com Chatter internally for about a month now; it already feels like a cool, useful tool, but what can we do to make it even better?

Personally I believe Chatter needs (in order of importance):

• Re-Tweet style functionality, to allow folks with low visibility to be seen and make it easier to spread good ideas virally across the network;
• Support for @usernames, to address Chats to specific people;
• A dedicated page with auto refresh, making it not dependent on manual updates or email notifications;
• “Like” button;
• Rich follow email alerts, ala Topify;
• Embed video inline in a Chat, with support for Youtube and Vimeo.

Vote the ideas you like, and share your thoughts (and IdeasExchange links) in the comments!

Written by Alessandro on 14 Mar 2010 — Tagged with: chatter, google wave, service cloud

The current incarnation of the Wave robot facilitated a ‘public’ conversation with a user and a support agent. What if we extended this scenario to let the agent start a ‘private’ conversation using Chatter? Then write some code to have Chatter reach out to Wave, and start more ‘public’ conversations with vendors who may be able to collaborate together to solve a customers problem. Finally, all of the decisions of this conversation could be recorded as Tracked Changes through Chatter, giving visibility to the rest of the organization.

Sounds like a great idea, and a good example of where convergent technologies can be used in inventive new ways. Cloud computing makes this collaboration easier than ever before.

via Chatter & Google Wave. So many possibilities. – Force.com Blog.