Chatter: Amplified

Last evening, fellow ZDNet'ers Mike Krigsman, Dion Hinchcliffe, Tom Foremski, Brian Sommer along with fellow Enterprise Advocate Vinnie Mirchandani and I sat down with Parker Harris, co-founder Salesforce.com to get a deep dive into the rationale behind Chatter, what it's really about and where it's going.

In the above video (7 mins 5 secs), Parker talks about the problems of email and how Chatter can serve as a platform for collaboration, initially around the sales and service processes upon which Salesforce.com concentrates. As the conversation moved on, he also talked about how simply taking Twitter style feeds of itself is not enough and that that company needs to work on filtering and semantic analysis so that people are receiving the right data. This addresses the key issue of relevance around the infusion of social computing technologies into the more formalized structures of CRM (for example.) Salesforce.com is clearly in 'thinking' mode on this topic and will watch how customers use Chatter before making significant development investments.

It's an enthralling conversation and one that provides excellent insights into how Salesforce.com is thinking about collaboration both in the short and longer term.

Disclosure: Salesforce.com met my travel and expenses to Dreamforce.