Has anyone else noticed the Facebook explosion over the last 6 weeks?  I’ve been mulling over the reasons why it’s happening now…..right now, and have only a couple very subjective conclusions.  It can only be that the holidays represent a time for people to catch up on the things they’ve been meaning to do for months, but just haven’t had the time.  Or maybe it’s the economy and folks are trying to figure out how to utilize a service that’s essentially free to grow their business.  Nah…that’s a stretch.

Seriously, since the week of Thanksgiving, the number of Facebook invitations I’ve received has increased exponentially.  Many from the high school days (a long time ago….).  It seems that Facebook penetration has gone from level 1 or maybe 2 (early adopters, somewhat early adopters) to mainstream – almost overnight.  Friends in high school I’d never suspect would embrace Facebook have done just that.  I even received an invitation to connect from someone in my church’s Confirmation class over the Christmas break.

Clearly this is a good thing for Facebook.  But it truly does present an opportunity for marketers who are looking for cheap or free marketing to generate a few leads.  I think we’re all still figuring out how best to take advantage of this opportunity, but social marketing is on the top of my list of things to master in 2009.

Cloudware — used as early as 2007 to refer to things like Google Maps, normal people will start saying it this year to refer to just about everything.

"AWS It" — putting something on AWS’s S3, EC2 or Turk instead of going the dirt computing route.

Web 11.0 — someone will surely co-opt this meaningless string of syllables in a vain attempt to lend it real significance.  Won’t be dull enough to be widely used until mid 2010.  But seriously: I had to go all that way to Web 11.0 to find one that wasn’t  in some degree of use.  Check this out: formal definitions for Web 1.0 through Web 8.0.

"He’s an Abe"* — that guy — you know the one — who keeps arguing that you need to keep data on a server in house and that you can’t really deal with the downtime imposed by an external service provider’s schedule maintenance window.**

Pie — OK, that’s not PaaS / SaaS or otherwise buzzworthy.  I just like pie.   Any you’d like to contribute? Feel free in comments.

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* Estimated time until we get a cease and desist or whatever on the image above? 9 minutes.  Special thanks to Josh Birk for  finding the image.

** Cause you know in house servers never go down.

It’s the time of year for predictions.  Everyone has their prognostication hat on. My thoughts?  We’ll need a buzzword for all those servers we’re killing.  It should be slightly negative.

I call dibs on "dirt computing". 

From what I can tell, 2009 is not likely to be a good year for dirt computing.

Note – Screen shots for Blackberry and iPhone below.

Dreamforce ’08 has come and gone.  We had a couple of nice mentions — Lasso2Go of course but we also had the DFMobile application. Hit http://dfmobile.force.com from your mobile device if you’d like to see it.  It works on a Blackberry, a WAP/ simple XHTML compatible device or an iPhone.

The use case: you’re a Dreamforce 08 attendee and you want to find out about the event from your phone.  And if you’ve already registered on the Dreamforce portal, you can access the schedule you built there on your mobile device.  You can search partners and sessions, find out more information about the Foo Fighters and local watering holes, and a whole lot more.*

The basic system is pretty straightforward.  Some details:

• The back end is the existing SFDC event registration system based on customer portal.
• The DFMobile piece starts at a page that inspects the client and redirects to either the WAP / simple XHTML page or to the iPhone page based on the HTTP_ACCEPT environmental variable.
• Both resulting pages use the same Apex controller and are based on Force.com Sites.  Sites lets users see public information — partners, sessions, local info — without authenticating.
• Users have the ability to search partners and sessions based on some simple criterial.
• Users also have the ability to login.  Once logged in, the user can see the schedule they originally created on the full web client.

There were a few other features that didn’t quite make it to production.  For example, we created a way to highlight the particular room a session was in on the iPhone client.  And to be clear, this is used a single image that the iPhone highlighted based on coordinates in the object.  The only reason it didn’t make it to production was the timing of go-live.

For the iPhone developers out there, this is using the CiUI library from CNET.  Over all, CiUI was pretty serviceable.  The only thing that came up occassionally was an odd timing issue related to how fast CiUI could respond to user input.  Sometimes, during testing, the javascript that replaces the body of a page would get out of synch with the results coming back from SFDC.  The page would then display without the decorative wrapper containing the header, footer and CSS.  Note: this apears to have only been an issue in artificial rapid fite tesing, not in production, and wasn’t an issue related to Force.com response times.

The biggest lesson learned? Getting the permissions aligned between the custom object, customer portal and Force.com sites takes a minute to get used to.  If something isn’t checked, your application will appear unresponsive.  If your app appears unresponsive, chances are good that it’s related to permissions.

A pretty exciting project all in all.

Blackberry Screenshots

Blackberry Main Screen (WAP/Simple XHTML)

Blackberry Session Search Form

Blackberry Session Search Results

 iPhone Splash Screen

iPhone Main Menu

iPhone, post login, My Sessions > Tuesday view

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* OK, well, not a whole lot more, but some more.  Check it out on the

Attended SFDC’s Cloudforce in NYC today.  It was at The Pierre — a pretty nice hotel.  Two digressions to get out of the way: love the new Tommy Bahama shirts, was not a big fan of the chicken salad sandwiches.

Mr. Benioff & crew did their job.  Highlights:

One person came out of the keynote and said, "I didn’t get it.  But I can tell you the last thing I want to buy right now is a server."  (Michael Dell should meet him.)

Another, "I advise a national non-profit. They keep wanting to build infrastructure.  I keep telling them not to and now I have more alternatives."

And my favorite, when I explained Lasso2Go and the whole Force.com Sites + Amazon AWS connection, "You can do that?" Yes.

Pretty good day.  And a side note on Lasso.  Today is the first day I’ve used it in ernest.  It’s pretty cool.  I used it to capture every business card someone handed me.

And where you might ask does Alec Baldwin come in? He was talking on a phone outside of Topaz, a Thai place we stopped at (get the Drunken Chicken —- AWESOME).  We — OK, I — gawked.  

Just the other day, we (we being the marketing team at Model Metrics) realized that we should make a relatively minor change to our website – the thought being that we could increase conversion or some such metric.  A little thought and literally 5 minutes of work and our change was rolled out onto our public website.  No big deal.

That’s how it works today though, or at least it should.  Not long ago, literally just a few years ago, it wasn’t so simple.  To make a website change, you had to involve a designer, a technical resource, and if you’re with a large company, a ton of approvals to make what should be a simple change.

But those simple changes truly are becoming simple now.  Content management systems have evolved to the point where nearly anyone can manage their own website without coding skills.  Want to change the written content?  It’s just like typing into a document program such as Microsoft Word.  Want to move things around on a page?  Just drag and drop.  Want to change some colors?  No coding, just do it in the wysiwyg editor.  Even a CMO can do this stuff.

Beyond content management for your website, there are a ton of other tools now available that can help a non-technical marketer at least appear have a hidden technical competence, in addition to truly being an effective employee or manager.

Here’s a few of them:

1. Google Sites – a great tool that let’s users quickly and easily create websites that enable just about anything.  We’ve used it to create a marketing asset management tool to allow password protected access to our logos, etc. for vendors.  Among others, we’ve also used it as a project management tool for partners we are co-developing applications with.
2. Content management systems – as mentioned above, check out WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
3. Graphics design programs, such as CS4 by Adobe.  These aren’t cheap, but save you money over the longer term and can significantly decrease the turnaround time on projects if you can establish even marginal proficiency yourself.
4. Salesforce Web to Lead (W2L) functionality – if you use Salesforce CRM and want a lead to automatically flow into your Salesforce application, it can automatically create the html code of your website’s registration form.

There’s literally hundreds of tools available today that can help marketers at all levels get the job done faster and less expensively without giving up quality. Hopefully these few get you started.

CHICAGO – December 3rd, 2008 – A powerful new search tool for Salesforce CRM on the Apple® iPhone makes it easy for salesforce.com users to search their Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities, and view details of the specific records found right on their iPhone…

<Link to full press release>

 Heading to Cloudforce in NYC?  So am I.  We’ll be talking about some of the standard stuff as well as one supercool addition.  You should definitely stop by our booth (I think it’s a booth — might be a table — either way stop by) and ask for a demo.  I’ll be there all day.