I think SFDC's release of Chatter will be huge. What do you think? What will stop it?

Chatter will be big inside the Salesforce.com customer base - especially since Salesforce will be spending a ton of marketing $ to make sure that happens.

The question is whether it will solve problems compelling enough to bring non-Salesforce customers to the platform. There are an awful lot of competitive collaboration platforms out there - I'm not yet convinced that Chatter is going to be a killer app - but we'll know soon enough.

Chris, I agree with you! Chatter is so tied in to the force.com platform that I think it will be a big success within salesforce.com's existing customer base. Whether it will be able to actually grow that customer base will be interesting to see.

Jim and Chris. Totally agree. Besides the price and adoption barriers outside of sales, the #1 chatter killer in my opinion ironically relates to all the chatter (i.e., noise) that it will likely create. When you start pulling status updates into a stream from systems and not just people it will get real noisy real quick. To my knowledge, the filtering capabilities are definitely lacking here and the ability to highlight what really matters is non-existent. At Jive, we've been thinking about these types of things for 10 years now. Check out this youtube vid for a quick overview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6txrPnVPE

There is no doubt that salesforce.com's announcement of Chatter last year and its release this year created the kind of buzz and set an interesting bar for the industry. It was unique to salesforce.com at the time that it was released and it provides two things that are very valuable. First, an aggregate set of social services. While you can find each of those social capabilities being done by other vendors - and sometimes better, Chatter is the only solution that provides it as an aggregate set, making it convenient and valuable. Second it provides as a specific capability, the ability to subscribe to ANY activity feed in a system - so, theoretically at least, I can see what's going on in my supply chain - even if it's system is run via SAP, for example.

But that said, there are two caveats to Chatter that are critical.

First, as a standalone product, its capabilities are at best ordinary and at worst not worth the money. But as a layer in force.com, Chatter has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool in a business - because as that layer the social tools it provides can be integrated with the other apps that are being built on the force platform. But it has to be a layer in force.com, not a standalone for that power to emerge. Luckily, it seems that salesforce.com is starting to think that way.

Second, the activity stream subscriptions, while a GREAT idea, don't have the filters that are needed to really eliminate the noise that a subscription to an activity stream will produce. Its ALMOST (and please not I said "almost") an all-or-none approach at this point. While there are other companies like Blogtronix and Bantam Live that have activity streams and filters what they don't have is the long term proven value proposition that salesforce.com has - which counts in the enterprise world. I'm not saying they don't have good products. They may. I haven't reviewed them yet and recently in that order. But salesforce.com has an historic proven value to enterprises over a decade. That will matter when it comes to acceptance of Chatter, with its flaws. But there is a possible threat to at least this with Jive's recent release of their Jive What Matters component of their SBS 4.5 product. This is also an activity stream subscription but the filtering, aggregation and reporting functions are incredibly powerful.

So, what does all this mean to a customer when it comes to Chatter? Chatter will be valuable as part of a portfolio of products that enhance the social capabilities of a company for customer engagement - as long as its part of a portfolio, not standalone. It's currently the only place that all these aggregate social services exist in a single integrated package and with salesforce's value proposition and longevity - that does count for something.

It will be interesting to see how it competes with Yammer which is supposedly doing very well with some very large customers. I think a lot depends on how the adoption of the Chatter picks up with current SFDC users and how that helps it to move beyond Sales & Marketing into all other parts of the organization. I am also wondering why Oracle and SAP have not considered this space yet. Wouldn't it be an easier product for any enterprise to buy from one of their core ERP/business software vendors?

Another factor worth watching as Chatter evolves will be its adoption by developers of Force.com applications. If developers build solutions that leverage Chatter in ways that deliver business value easily and effectively, those applications and Salesforce.com's AppExchange could drive broad adoption among and beyond current Salesforce.com customers. Assuming, of course, that those developers can get past Force.com's limitations...

We and our clients love Chatter. For us, its dropped our internal email traffic by more than 50% and enabled easy collaboration amongst our client facing staff (not just Sales). Personally I love the fact that data can Chatter at me as it saves me having to go find something I am interested in -- and we all have WAY too much to keep across daily so this is invaluable.

Yes, the filtering can be improved, but we are only on the initial release here so expect to see a lot more from Chatter as Salesforce.com enhances it.

Prospective Salesforce.com customers love it too so I do believe it will bring more users to the platform.