Salesforce's Chatter Free not a game changer, but very neat
Salesforce announced yesterday at the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco that a free version of their Chatter social collaboration tool would be available in April 2010 and it comes close to being a game-changer in the effort to monitor, control and use multiple social media platforms. But the concept of “free” is loosely defined. You don’t have to be a Salesforce license holder to use Chatter, but the company you work for does. And you can only invite people within that social community to participate. That means you can’t include any external business or personal contacts. You still have to maintain your own method for managing that. There are lots of free and commercial tools for that task. Too many, in fact, and one is as good/bad as any other. My hope for Chatter, when I started hearing about potential free management tools, was that it would be a way for common folk to get ahold of all that information without having...