Because of my true passion for what I've been involved in professionally, I've personally had a keen interest in social media. For the record, social media takes the cloud to the next level--it's Cloud 2.0, if you will. What does this mean to the person on the street? Well, Facebook and Twitter are the biggest examples of social media, and at their core, they have the power to truly be transformative.
You don't have to be a hard-core news junkie to realize this. You may have heard how Twitter specifically has been at the center of the Arab Spring. Think about that for a moment: as a tool it's so powerful that's it's been used as a component to overthrow corrupt regimes.
You may not use Twitter, but chances are that you do use Facebook. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, more people that we know are on Facebook than aren't. Because of this, Facebook has the potential to be one of the most transformative tools at our fingertips (please pardon the pun, it was completely unintentional).
If I were to ask you to list the things you liked most about Facebook, I have a feeling that somewhere near the top of your list would be the ease with which Facebook makes it possible to locate old friends and keep in touch with current ones (for the younger set that has no real memory of a pre-Facebook world, it's probably even more about the friends, trust me). This by its very definition is the "social network."
When I first started selling cloud technologies, I would stand in front of customers and enthusiastically talk how the technology I was selling was going to enable them to do what they were already doing, but it was going to enable them to do it better and on their own terms. It was extremely compelling for businesses, and now years later similar technology has found its way to the masses--I'm saying "similar" in this context because unlike what I was selling, Facebook and Twitter are available for free. Their value is similar to the product I was pitching however: in their own way they enable you to do what you were already doing... in this case, keep up with your friends while you go about your life.
And it's about to get better. Companies are currently developing and selling their own technologies that are similar to Facebook (and Twitter) and that interact with Facebook and Twitter. SalesForce.com is a great example of this, and I mention them specifically because I thoroughly enjoyed what should've been their keynote speech at the Oracle User Conference last year (http://www.youtube.com/user/salesforce?blend=4&ob=5)... I say "should've been" because their opportunity to speak was denied when it was determined that thier message was counter to Oracle's message (boo!). As SalesForce's CEO, Marc Benioff, points out in the opening minutes of his address, that the speech occurred at all is further testimony to the power of social media. His message makes an even more compelling case for Cloud 2.0.
I know not everyone (if anyone) is going to have the passion to sit through the hour-long address (again for the record, I have more than once), but for me, his main applicable point occurs at the 13-minute mark when Marc talks about SalesForce's Chatter product.
Marc's example at 55:40 shows a car interacting with Facebook to give you its status the same way your friends would. Again the world gets smaller, and you get to do what you're already doing, but better and on your own terms (keeping track of the oil or gas in your car in this case).
Amazing stuff... and I say that without any agenda of my own. I don’t work for SalesForce (but I will admit that selling this technology would definitely excite me). I love the fact that the world is getting smaller, and the social network is a big part of the reason why.
For now, that's what's on my mind. I'm sure there will be more to follow.
I have to add something that's more of an addition than a correction: as of January 9th, I do work for Salesforce.
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