As part of Appirio I was exposed to Chatter before the public announcement. I have to admit that when I originally first saw it I wasn't really impressed. I understand that people, applications, documents, etc. can Chatter but to me it seemed just like another social network that I would have to check in addition to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Even when Marc Benioff publically unveiled Chatter I was still luke warm to the technology.
The light bulb finally clicked when our CMO and Head of R&D, Narinder Singh, demoed our Social PS Enterprise in the Day 2 Keynote. It was by far the best demo at Dreamforce 09 and I had a number of non-Appirio people tell me so. In the demo Narinder showed how he could enter a new timecard and the project would Chatter that its status had gone from green to yellow. That's awesome in itself but the real magic was when he updated a spreadsheet in Google Docs and the project Chattered that it was now back on schedule. A number of people mentioned to me that there was a audible gasp when he pulled this off.
We have a really great demo of Social PS Enterprise on the Appirio site if you are interested in taking another look.
I'm really interested to see how they implement role and record based security to the Chatter that is broadcast. I'm also hoping that someone like Kyle Roche writes a client app that combines Chatter, Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps TweetDeck or Tweetie can be persuaded.
