Willis

Initially, they dubbed this the "Facebook of the Enterprise" but then they realized that the word "Facebook" is synonymous with the word "productivity killer" in the corporate world. I've had a chance to mess around with this feature in the development instances and I have to say, it's interesting. Essentially as I understand it, the application (Salesforce.com) will now speak to the user. The user dictates what they want to follow and as those records become updated, the application "tweets" updates to the user's chatter feed.

This chatter feed has a summary chatter feed on the users' homepages that will show all the chatter tweets across all objects. Each record (opportunity, account, etc.) also has it's own chatter history. The system administrator really defines what field changes will trigger a Chatter feed update so it's customizable to whatever extent people see as pertinent.

The biggest downside I see is that unless I'm missing something, the parent-child relationship doesn't work quite just right. Any updates made to the child do not trigger a chatter feed to the parent or the main chatter feed. This is huge given that some business thrive on the opportunity line item detail at times having those changes supersede the opportunity in importance.

I've actually spoken to one of the project managers and he says that my use case isn't currently supported. Speaking on personal experiences only, Salesforce.com has a pretty firm grasp on what they need to do in order to improve a product and I can't imagine that this isn't on their roadmap.

Overall, a very interesting tool. Like Mike says, I'll be looking forward to see how companies will utilize this social type technology in business day applications.