Please notify me

We have been using Salesforce Chatter at work. It is an excellent micro-blogging platform with many features. However one thing it lacks is notifications of incoming chatter posts and responses. The only way to get notified is by email. But that is like sending somebody an email, and then calling them up to tell them that you sent them an email.

Salesforce Chatter needs to provide better notifications.  I would prefer to get notified of incoming posts and replies through the push notifications on Android / iOS, that appear in the status bar. Or may be a Chrome extension that shows number of unread chatter posts in the status bar. Or something similar to what Facebook / Google+ provide. 

Gmail and Google Reader notifications in a Chrome Extension

 Google+ notifications in Gmail 

There are many to provide notifications without utilizing email.

Here are some of the interesting ideas posted on the Salesforce IdeaExchange for improving chatter notifications:

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000K8JMAA0

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000JhxkAAC

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000XoYjAAK

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000Yq0JAAS

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000g1TfAAI

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000KcuxAAC

So if any Salesforce engineer is reading this blog, I would like to request them to take a look at the aforementioned ideas and provide a better form of notifications.

Sincerely,
an avid chatter user 

Please, please, please don't call it "Social Networking", unless you wanna appear clueless

These days I am seeing a gross, egregious, and flagrant misuse of the term "Social Network". Every company that implements a micro-blogging solution w/ profiles for their employees wants to call the implementation a "Social Networking" platform. These apps are almost exclusively “social media” platforms. Nothing to do with Social Networking. Social Networking is when you use the transactional data from these Social Media apps to create Social Graphs and perform a Social Network Analysis (SNA).
 
Now anytime, anyone use the term Social Network incorrectly, I send them the following diagram, and hope that they correct themselves:

(The source for this venn-diagram is available as a Google Drawing at  http://bit.ly/SocialMedia_vs_SocialNetwork . Please feel free to send to anyone who misuses the term Social Networking)
 
Some thoughts:
Setting up an internal (contained) social media sites (e.g. yammer, chatter, lotus connections etc) should NOT be the end-goal in itself. The Social Graph generated from the interactions on the site should be used to improve the employee experience e.g. by performing social network analysis or using the Social Graph to add relevancy in the query results on the Enterprise Search Engine etc. Lots of use cases……

Update on Monday, March 28, 2011 at 8:21PM by Saqib Ali

A relevant blogpost by Darin Stewart of Gartner:
http://blogs.gartner.com/darin-stewart/2011/03/28/facebook-is-not-a-social-network/ 

Darin writes:

 Facebook is not in and of itself a social network.  It is a tool that facilitates social networks.  It is a subtle but important distinction.  A social network is a social structure (more anthropological than technological) made up of people, organizations and the interrelationships among them. If we focus purely on the websites, the tools, the games that surround social networks it is easy to lose sight of their purported reason for existing, which is to foster and facilitate these connections and interactions among people.

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