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All the buzz last week was about Google’s announcement of its new cross-social networking platform Open Social (see ReadWriteWeb for more information). Salesforce is one of the founding partners and promises to create the ability to integrate social networking data (Plaxo and LinkedIn) into the business enterprise domain. For me personally, I was all aflutter by the idea. That is, until I saw the cheesy Google Campfire video and the sf.com demo (minute 43). While Theikos demo’d an interesting contact cloud application – which I have little doubt most nonprofits could not afford – it did not show much in the way of how Open Social was going to hook into sf.com.
The more I got to thinking about this, the more all this bugged me. Sf.com doesn’t natively have the ability to do contact-to-contact relationships (similar to the account-to-account relationships in the Partner utility). I’ve been told repeatedly by the great folks at sf.com that it’s a B2B application, and so there wasn’t much customer demand for C2C (reciprocal) relationships. So if sf.com has been working with Google on this for the past several months (year?), why is there no native C2C relationship building functionality in this release, or even on the roadmap?
Vis-a-vis the Theikos demo, I’m left with the question: Will sf.com’s ability to hook into the Open Social platform rely on costly third party vendors to access C2C relationships? Or is this finally the business case that sf.com has been waiting for to finally offer it as a feature (yet where’s the promoted Idea?)?
great to see you blogging again, Sonny! I read eagerly!
Open social is an api layer to lay on top of a Container. In this case, the container is sf.com. It’s up to the Container developer to decide what a “friend” is.
The Theikos app and what Ron Hess has made public on google code, have their own definition of what a friend is. If you want a friend to be someone who is connected to a contact via a custom relationship object, you can do that. Or it could be people who have been on the same Campaign. Or whatever you want.
So open social doesn’t change the fact that there isn’t a great way to ID friends in sf.com, but lets you expose whatever you’ve called friends to apps that talk open social.
My thinking on open social and it’s importance in the sf.com context is half baked at this point. But, I think there are fundamental differences between using opensocial as a social network user and using it as a CRM user.
And, I think “node equivilence” is going to be the best feature of the whole thing–determining if a friend in one system is the same as a friend in another. Not sure if that made it into this version of open social or not…as I said, half baked.
Thanks Steve. Point taken. Admittedly, my response was fairly half baked as well. Thanks for helping to connect the technical dots of Open Social and the social network ecosystem that it aims to establish.
For me, its just incredibly ironic that some level of native social networking does not exist (i.e. reciprocal contact-to-contact relationships and the ability to report on it)in sf.com, while they look outward to create the ability to connect our contacts to external (to sf.com) data.
Here’s a slighly different thought.
I’m working with an organization that recruits volunteers and places them in schools. They’re moving their volunteer management onto Salesforce and have been talking about wanting to set up a volunteer portal on their website, which would allow volunteers (especially “super volunteers” who actually might log-on) to manage their own profiles, see what training was available to them, see their status in terms of becoming super volunteers.
It occured to me that making people come to the organization web site and log-in to manage and control their own data is a dated concept — and the Salesforce customer portal is expensive for 1000s of constituents. It occurred to me that in a web 2.0 world, wouldn’t it make more sense for volunteer data to be accessible wherever volunteers wanted it (e.g. facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, etc.). Then I started thinking about Open Social (kill many birds with one OS application).
Is it possible to create an Open Social application that a constituent could add to whatever social networking platform they want that allows them to see and update their organizational data stored in Salesforce? Ideally, the applciation would allow them to make certain data (e.g. badges earned or other data, like “super volunteer” or “1000 hours volunteered”) visible to friends in their network. Enable the viral aspect of this by showing a “learn more” link in the app that friends could click, thus also tracking a volunteer’s impact on recruitment.
I think something like this application would have a double impact: 1) increase the usage of people controlling their own data; 2) use their data visibly as a recruiting mechanism through their social networks.
Food for thought. I would love to hear if anyone’s doing something like this.
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