Collaborating through Streams of Information

Salesforce.com jumped into cloud computing before the term even existed. The company was founded in 1999 to offer businesses a customer-relationship management (CRM) service that ran online and didn’t require software to be installed on employees’ computers. But last year, Salesforce entered a decidedly more crowded market: the one for collaboration tools. Like other such services, Chatter takes elements from Facebook and Twitter and puts them into an application that helps employees assist each other much more efficiently than they can by endlessly e-mailing documents to each other. The company’s chief scientist, JP Rangaswami, explained to Technology Review‘s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, why Salesforce thinks Chatter is unique, and how collaborating in the office might become much more like a game—in a good way.