Gideon is blogging again

Last Updated on Monday, 26 November 2007 01:36 Written by Steve Monday, 26 November 2007 01:36

My boss returns to the blogging world with a newly launched blog in our Plone site. He has some interesting thoughts on engagement and how all this can tie back to where we live.

Welcome back Gideon!

I’ve switched from bloglines to google reader

Last Updated on Thursday, 22 November 2007 07:56 Written by Steve Thursday, 22 November 2007 07:56

I didn’t think I’d do it, but I have ditched Bloglines for Reader. Ditched is a little strong–I can go back at any time with very little trouble.

We all have our own individual preferences when it comes to feed readers. I have been using Bloglines for years, and have found it to be a mostly enjoyable experience. I loved the iPhone support that they came out with right away.

Then Reader just kept getting better. And the recently released iPhone support is better than Bloglines. The interface is much better and I can get 20 stories on one iPhone page, which leads to much faster browsing through my list.

Thanks for the years of service, Bloglines! Who knows, I may be back to using you at some point…

Salesforce and Open Social

Last Updated on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 12:37 Written by Steve Wednesday, 21 November 2007 12:37

There has been a ton of buzz about Google’s coup to get all social networking development to use their API set. And for good reason. The social graph is really interesting information, and likely to be the next frontier for the Internet to capitalize on. While Facebook won’t change the world, having social relationships in computer readable form has amazing potential along a lot of fronts. Marketers are drooling over it so they can sell to your friends, activists want to know what powerful people you know, and fund raisers want you to bring your friends with checkbook in hand.

We’ve been thinking about how to leverage the social graph in Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is interested as well–if the platform can’t roll with the latest ideas in marketing and outreach, users will scratch that itch in some other way. And you can see Adam Gross at the Open Social launch party introducing a demo of Friends pulled from Salesforce.com.

But wait a minute, what are friends in Salesforce.com? And that brings up a glaring weakness in Salesforce.com when you think about the social graph:

In Salesforce.com today there is no standard way to connect people as friends.

Sure, you can create a custom object to track person-to-person relationships. But yours will be different from everyone else’s, because they had to invent their own, too. And they have

When Salesforce.com users want to play in the Open Social space, one hurdle they’ll have to clear is writing their definition of “friendship” into their Open Social implementation. Bummer.

But what if Salesforce.com added a Person-to-Person relationship object? They have ways to to Organization-to-Organization relationships, and Organization-to-Contact relationships. Why not a new one? Adding things to the code base is a heck of a lot easier than changing what’s already there.

I would love to see this new standard object (you can vote for it on Ideas). Relate two People together with a description of the relationship, and a start and end date. Allow me to create custom fields on the relationship so I can be as detailed as I want. Then write an Open Social reference implementation that leverages that object.

Salesforce.com, I’d be happy to do any kind of beta testing of such an object. You’ve got my number!