Distinguishing the Chatter from the chatter

Salesforce.com's continuous stream of evangelism makes it difficult to separate the reality from the hype

Salesforce.com: Chatter adds social networking functions

To me Salesforce.com is a bit like the boy who cried 'Wolf!'.

Every press release it issues contains claims of industry revolution, even if all that is announcing is some incremental development of its service portfolio or another partnership of convenience.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Salesforce.com is a great company with a great set of offerings, but the continuous stream of evangelism does make it hard to separate the reality from the hype.

It’s because of this that I almost missed the significance of Chatter, which is the new social networking element added into the Salesforce.com portfolio. On the surface Chatter provides what looks like a basic Twitter or Facebook update-type functionality, but on a secure and private basis.

At the time Chatter was announced towards the end of last year, way ahead of it being available on general release – as usual – I didn’t take much notice of it. After all, it seemed a bit of a niche, closed and limited compared to the more horizontal enterprise social media by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

This week, however, Tony Lock (Programme director at Freeform Dynamics) and I attended an industry analyst gathering at which a number of Salesforce.com customers shared their early experiences of Chatter (which by the way is now available to be turned on by any subscriber to the core application services for no additional fee).

As the customers told their stories, it gradually dawned on me that there was something really significant going on here. To understand this, we need to recap on some of my previous analysis.

Dale Vile is research director at Freeform Dynamics. You can read this blog in full here.