Chatter

Chatter is a great tool that helps people conveniently collaborate at work. It is a tool made by Salesforce, one of the biggest names in enterprising communication webapps. At first glance Chatter looks similar to Twitter or Facebook with the profiles, status updates, and streaming in-line comments. However, what makes it different is it’s a private social network that is just for your business. What I mean by that is you connect with your co-workers and people within your organization and everything within that network is kept private from others. This helps with community building, by making your business or company more connected and accessible to each other. Only people with a verified company email address can join your company network. This can save businesses a lot of time by having little meetings on Chatter to prepare for presentations, or to discuss future ideas, especially since you can communicate while people are in different places geographically. Once you join on Chatter, you can make a profile which helps you get to know more about your colleagues and also have them learn more about you. You can also post and share large files for times where you need an employee’s opinion before a meeting or to proofread a presentation.

Recently they have added new features to Chatter to improve the convenience for connecting with important parts of your business. They made applications for your cell phones, iPad, and your desktop computer to conveniently preview files and share new updates. They have also added customer groups, to securely connect to customers and respond and obtain feedback. Salesforce has really created Chatter to make communicating throughout the business easier than ever. With being able to connect, message, and communicate from anywhere, anytime, while just being on the computer really transforms the way a company can work.

Almost At

When choosing new technologies, Almost.At was a way of communicating that I never heard of previously. Almost.At makes it possible to communicate with each other in real time. Almost.At is a very interesting application to research about. It is a site, developed by Iphone developer David Cann, that allows people to follow events and communicate in real time. What makes this different from Twitter and other social networks is the organized layout, and you can see who is actually attending an event instead of just talking about it. The layout of the site is something that catches your eye when you first see it. It is a very polished organize layout that prevents any real confusion. The left column has live events with the numbers of views that are actually happening, as well as recent events where you can still see the streaming feed. When you click on an event you see three more columns. The first column is labeled “Text”, the next is labeled “Photos and Videos” and the third column is labeled “Links”. For example, when you got to Almost.At, one of the events shown under the recent tabs is the 2011 NBA Draft. When you click it there is a long stream of texts of tweets talking about the event. The middle column has pictures of some basketball players and other photos related to the event and the next column has Youtube videos, articles, twitterpicture links and more that all relate to the event. What also makes it interesting on the bottom there is a timeline at the bottom that you can browse through the history of the event and it updates/goes back to the previous streams of the event. The way to differentiate between the people who are talking about it and actually going, you can click the + button on the side of the tweet and it adds them to a Followees list. This makes all of the attending people more able to communicate in real time about the event. Overall, this application is appealing to people with all of the options and ability the site has.