LSQHA Blog Reviews

Today, we drop another another segment in the Rulers of the Cloud series, focusing on SalesForce.com, the cloud innovator that re-invented the rules of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). SalesForce is growing into a big company, recently announcing over a $1 billion in revenue annual run rate . Yet, the company is still an agile organization focusing on upheaval of the enterprise through cloud services. The newest release brought a major new services focus, SalesForce Chatter . We took a look and found that this product may be the service that brings the company further into the enterprise as a dominant enterprise cloud and collaboration vendor. Sponsor Chatter is an industrial-grade collaboration framework that is designed for mixing following and deal flow, and finding the place where communication drives sales. Chatter feels like Twitter for the enterprise, with the advantage that its multi-tenant approach can be hosted and segmented for your organization. The toolkit was recently opened for select developers as part of the company release, dubbed LadyBug. We'll take a look at the core business and how this product may inspire IT leaders to create real-time tools for the enterprise. A Critical Asset: The Business Forecast To plot out the company's future, we want to highlight the past and present briefly. The company competes with big enterprise vendors such as SAP and Oracle for CRM. From day one, SalesForce has had a "No Software" mantra focus on the power of cloud platform approach. The lightweight, easy-to-install platform has lots of tools for the management of hardcore customer information including the scenario shown here. A Critical Asset: Developer Tools SalesForce's offerings for the enterprise are evolving. Key updates to the platform continue to roll out, as these shown for the Spring 2010 Ladybird release. In our recent briefing of SalesForce Chatter the thing that impressed us most is how the development community can use all of the SalesForce platform APIs in concert with the new Chatter services. In this case, a developer of "Chatter Bubbles" has taken chatter experience back to the future with a closer parity with Twitter. This demonstration peaked our interest, seeing how the Chatter experience could easily tug the "I could build a better Twitter" emotion. Now, each enterprise team that deploys Chatter can customize microblogging for the company or salesteam on top of the SalesForce collaboration cloud. A Critical Asset: Platform as a Service We noticed that SalesForce.com has a deep set of partners and relationships to technology companies. For this reivew, we took a look at the SalesForce and Adobe partnership as an example of where the company has, like its relationship with Google, created a partnership that brings the organizations' developers together. In the announcement here, the we see that Adobe AIR and the Flash platform are being enabled to consume SalesForce objects and to create persistent rich client applications. AIR has seen a lot of exposure in the Twitter application space, with very popular applications living on its client technology. Killer Enterprise Apps are Right Here, Right Now If we put all those things together, we see a new class of application emerging in the enterprise, literally a Tweetdeck -like, keyword-filter powered command center for each facet of the organization. We think enterprise software is headed there, and with the pieces SalesForce has put together, it could be built. This Tweetdeck screenshot sparked our imagination of how we could build a rich client for the enterprise. In the example shown, we can see the streams flowing further together to cross the enterprise to social bridge. In this perfect world, we see @GigaOM as our CIO, and @TechCrunch as head of marketing. Demi Moore is our CEO and wants to know your deal is flowing. In this not-so-distant future, we see the threads of decisions, meetings, and key concepts fly by in real time, and simple, user-controlled filtering could give personalized views to any stream. The Cloud Opportunity is Still Evolving In a way, SalesForce's biggest challenge is opportunity. The platform works; it has an obvious opportunity to chip away at the CRM market and adjacent markets through the dynamics it has been founded on. We wonder how platforms bind themselves to SalesForce and how the enterprise cloud might evolve. Here's a few we'll be interested in learning more about. Should the company go much further in building a developer community, or should it integrate the communities within other platforms (Google, Adobe, Microsoft). As a platform company, will SalesForce.com also be able to build the killer app for Chatter? Is it addictive? From our view, the question isn't will Chatter beat other tools, but instead, will it be a dominant form of communication? Will chatter beat email? From what we've heard so far, it has promise, but we'd like to see it. How does the Force.com cloud map to cloud efforts at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware? Will there emerge a deeper integration between online and offline cloud resources, or a peering of services between SalesForce and Amazon, SalesForce and VMware? What is SalesForce.com's trajectory with core services like compute, storage, and other things that are getting clouded in the enterprise? Do multi-vendor collaboration platforms work? Should we expect that both Buzz and Chatter will be at our fingertips, or will in the end, one application win? We see the advantage of being "the message bus", like Twitter, and enabling smart clients to define experience, similar to TweetDeck's relationship with Twitter. In this case, it is the application (Tweetdeck) that decided to support other social apps (social clouds) such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Perhaps we'll see the same in enterprise collaboration. Will SalesForce.com update its brand to show off the breadth of the opportunity? As an example, Apple Computer became Apple, Inc. to represent itself. Could SalesForce.com become Force? Does it need to? Personalities Matter: Are you Social with Your Boss? A lot of organizations are awaking to enterprise social opportunity, including the small and growing Yammer and Jive . These companies are bringing next-generation communications to the enterprise. There seems to be a communication landscape change, where the boundaries of "water cooler" and "board meeting" will meet. It will be interesting to see how these tools promote themselves and how social etiquette will evolve. Will our CEO send us an inspirational quote of the day, like so many others do on Twitter? Or, instead, next time you log on, will there be a direct message: "Come to my office"? This brings us back to SalesForce.com. For many in the enterprise, the question isn't only "What's happening", like it is on Twitter , but instead "Did you close?". This is where we think SalesForce's core premise of building a strong core business from CRM, along with its well-formed APIs give it a path to meet its ambition for delivering on leaderships thirst for knowledge. We wonder, will SalesForce.com power your CEO's real time view of your organization? Discuss

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Rulers of the Cloud: Your CEO has a SalesForce.com-Powered TweetDeck, and She's Following You

We've talked a lot on ReadWriteStart about how design is an important facet of the development of a web applications for startups. Last week we provided some advice on how to deal with irate customers who hate your design changes, and earlier this month we talked about how small design tweaks can have big impacts of the use of your site. Sponsor The main theme of these posts is that good design is worth the time and effort because it goes a long way in attracting and maintaining users, but really, who is to say what "good design" is? A recent entry on the blog ignore the code by Swiss software engineer Lukas Mathis raises an interesting point about user interfaces and how some users prefer that they maintain their complexity . They like complicated user interfaces? It seems strange, but Mathis argues that mastering a cluttered interface gives users a sense of superiority. One example of this that Mathis points out is the Bloomberg Terminal, a complexly designed business interface whose users might revolt if it were simplified, as some studies have shown. "Some complex user interfaces may also give people the perception of having more control," writes Mathis. "Another reason why people sometimes avoid simple devices is that they perceive them as being made specifically for children, or for 'stupid' people." So how does this apply to Web startup culture? What it says is that not all users are the same. Not everyone is looking for the cleanest and simplest design; some want more features and more complexity. The thing to remember is there is a difference between having a complex interface and having a complicated interface. Even the simplest of interfaces, Twitter , has begun to add more complexity with new retweet features, lists, trending topics, and more. Aesthetically, "good design" means design that is appealing to the eye, and is easily navigated visually. With this idea, it is important that complex interfaces are well designed so that the users who prefer simplicity do not feel overwhelmed. So "good design" may be simply design that is both aesthetically refined, and that also serves to aid both novices and power users in easily finding the features they want without feeling over or underwhelmed - balanced, and right in the sweet spot. I would love to hear what people think of this idea, so please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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Finding the Balance of Design and Functionality

If the future is all about touchscreen interfaces, then performance of the screen in registering where it's been touched is pretty important. International design firm Moto ran a robotic finger test on 6 leading touchscreen smart phones to see how well they registered a robot's loving touch. Some of the phones did remarkably poorly, like the BlackBerry Storm and the Motorola Droid. The iPhone, Google Nexus One and HTC Droid Eris all did quite well. Check out the video below to see the tests and marvel at the apparent differences between touchscreens and their performances. Sponsor Robot Touchscreen Analysis from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo . As Sadat Karim writes on Neowin , "Hope is not lost though, as Moto Labs concludes that they do expect these problems to be remedied in the future as touchscreens mature and gain further traction in the industry. Commitment and competition will ultimately deliver seamless touch experiences for all consumers over time, since phone makers are continuously perfecting their products." To see touchscreen hardware nerds duke it out over the test, check out the Moto Labs blog . How about you, readers? Have you felt the difference in performance across some of these handsets? See also: User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload Discuss

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Test Shows: iPhone Touchscreen Still the Best

The world's second Internet of Things Conference is scheduled to take place at the end of November in Tokyo. The deadline for papers was just extended to June 1 - which gave us an idea. Conference planners have put together a list of suggested topics for papers . We took that list and then rounded up our ongoing reporting and analysis for each of the eight topics as a way to help you understand how vast and far reaching IoT will end up being. Sponsor 'Green by Internet of Things / Green of Internet of Things Technology' Our recent list of 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home , looked at the IoT from a domestic standpoint. From handling toxic waste, to watershed management, to building design, to transportation, to the smart energy grid, a whole new green way of thinking is going to be made possible by IoT. 'Future sustainable technologies linking the physical and virtual world' Different industries have have already been able to increase the efficiency of freight shipping by using sensors to tell them the location and condition of their product in real-time. This includes FedEx's SenseAware , which is designed to constantly keep track of the vital signs of all its packages. In future posts we'll be covering IoT-driven growth in the fields of virtual factories, digital cities, agriculture and forest management. 'Novel services and applications to facilitate environmental responsibility' Did you hear about the guy who wired his house up to a Twitter account so that it alerted him whenever an appliance was used? Following that experiment, Matt Morey figured out a way to use iobridge to turn that one-way Twitter alert system into a two-way system that makes it possible to turn appliances on and off via Twitter. These ideas, which may seem novel at first, signal the direction towards the development of whole new industries. 'Emerging Internet of Things business models and process changes' Companies as large as IBM have invested heavily in IoT. It has a website called Smarter Planet , which is dedicated to "smarter solutions," of which they say they've already developed 12,00 hundred. We've also written about ThingD, which is creating a registry of things, as well as REZZ.IT, which is building a business based on the idea that "things have a network and their own audience." 'Communication systems and network architectures for the IoT' Pachube is the IotT business that has earned the most coverage and analysis from us. Pachube is a service that stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. MQTT , which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is also noteworthy. It is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." More recently, Google launched an API for PowerMeter , which allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. Also worth mention is our article on Arrayent that aims to be the "Cisco of small things" - which is basically middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it's targeting smartphones. 'Experience reports from the introduction and operation of networked things in areas such as healthcare, logistics & transport' IoT is still so new that we have only just begun to see the results of research. But with RFID, for example (which is one of the more mature IoT technologies), we've reported on how there have been challenges that limit predicted growth. There's also still impediment to to the viable use of IofT-like location-based services . 'Emerging applications and interaction paradigms for everyday citizens' From preventing lost luggage , to the latest IoT gadgets , telling the story of what a person's everyday daily life is an integral part of IoT. Most notable is the presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell, who describes how sensors in everything may one day mean the sensor in your toothbrush gives you online gaming points if you brush for the full three minutes. He also envisions sensors that track if you are watching TV commercials and again rewards you with online gaming points. Core to Schell's ideas is the belief that these incentives may seem a bit creepy, but they have potential to help us create a less corrupted, more accountable and ethical world. 'Social impacts and consequences: security, privacy, opportunities and risks' In our What The Internet of Things Means For You series we covered privacy issues related to the use of RFID and barcode readers. The latest reports show how advertisement, RFID and geolocation have combined to raise serious privacy concerns. Additionally, location-based data can be a threat to personal privacy in the context of how the U.S. congress has started to draft location-based privacy protection laws. Are you going to the Tokyo for Internet of Things Conference? What do you hope to learn there? Let us know in the comments, or by emailing tips@readwriteweb.com , what we should be discussing in the months leading up to the event. Discuss

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8 Ways to Better Understand the Internet of Things

When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I've been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it's the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I'd miss new developments. It's a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I've seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments. Sponsor Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing Gumbaby.com . She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education. As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They've been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these "strangers" (as I've come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn't be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on - isn't this partly our fault? The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit. Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I've seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website. But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to "Sign in with Facebook." They did - many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line "Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment." Text Boxes: They're Confusing When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled "Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)." Where do these comments go? It doesn't say. It's down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you're looking at it, you can't see most of the page's identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled. When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, "People will put just anything in a text box," and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they're sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it's a word processor, and "Submit" means the same thing as "save." A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with "online prayer" - an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you'll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson's organization ranking among the top ones . Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need - a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don't understand where a comment form goes anyway. Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type. Literacy is Not the Problem - New Kinds of Literacy Are ReadWriteWeb readers and other "natives" call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these "idiot" commenters should be "weeded out of the gene pool.") One favorite insult is "illiterate." As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don't even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.) But beyond being unfair, it's not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don't always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write). Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don't write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others. Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can't be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill. In fact, "strangers" are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing ("Dear Facebook,") who is writing ("Thanks, Linda") and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field. One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven't had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn't improve their skills. Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say "ommfg, this is not Maury Povich's website!" My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things - M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc - could now be customized. The blogger titled his post "Ketchup of the People." The commenter wrote: I found the order for custom printed m & m's in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m's with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it's pretty cruel? Please respond. Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger's page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy - was it a scam? Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that's just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don't always have the information they need to understand what's going on. Next page: What is a URL? What is a URL? One of the most important elements errant commenters aren't using, which the tech-savvy have at their command, is a page's URL. Internet-illiterate commenters generally don't know what "URL" means, or what one does. Check the URLs attached to their names in blog comments; you will often find they have entered an email address, subject line, their name, or something to the effect of "I don't know what this is" in the URL field that went with their comment.The fact that many errant commenters seem to enter "Facebook" into Google's search field to get to the page also suggests that URLs aren't a part of their Internet literacy skills. Interface designers aren't helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren't just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it. Obscuring or drawing attention away from URLs keeps people from understanding how to judge the quality of material on the Internet. Considering that most people have not had schooling to help them understand the Internet - and it's unlikely that even kids in school today have formal opportunities to learn about URLs, considering the number of schools which limit Internet access - these steps taken by UI designers simply compound the problem. Which leads me to my final point: They're Not Illiterate - You Are As crazy as it sounds, Melanson makes a certain amount of sense when he lays the blame for the Facebook flap at Google's feet . Google is the best search engine going right now, but it's not perfect. The shift to real-time results and its underlying popularity-contest mechanic make it ineffective in specific settings. ("Specific" being key; the other problem with search engines, and the subject of extensive research in schools of information, is their inability to respond to a given user's context. But that's a topic for another article.) Facebook - and even ReadWriteWeb - are also somewhat to blame, considering how the cross-site login service is presented to users; as I noted, the messages sent to those signing in are unclear (thanks for signing in to what? Now you can comment where? What does it mean to sign in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, anyway? Is this a scam?) Literacy is a two-way street. They may be dumb for not reading the pages right, but some of the code, search algorithms, and interfaces involved aren't perfect, either. Not to mention the way "savvy" commenters and other bloggers write. The more people linked to the original ReadWriteWeb thread with the words "Facebook login" in the link, the more the ReadWriteWeb thread appeared to Google to be relevant to Facebook login. As has been noted, blog posts with "Facebook" in the title were likely to see more unwanted traffic as well. This even spread the problem to other blogs linking to ReadWriteWeb, some of whom also started to see login requests in their comment threads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has noted bad titling among a number of we see what you did there ) is not the same thing as a solution to the problem. Photo by Miguel Ugalde Discuss

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Web Illiteracy: How Much Is Your Fault?