So what’s next? Well, I think what’s next (and by far most interesting) is some concept of the “strength” of a connection. Specifically, today I can see a lot of my friends’ social networks, but I have no idea for the relative strength of connections. Sure, if I see Person A knows Person B, I can always make an offline inquiry to see if that connection is strong or weak. But very soon I think we are going to have tools like Xobni that profile communications patterns and surface that information both to end users and to other applications. And it won’t be just social networking and community applications that benefit. Enterprise applications (collaboration tools, CRM tools, HR/recruiting systems, etc) will all benefit from having access to some of this information. We’ll call this contextual “strength” Phase III.

Phase III is really interesting to me because I think it has to be a largely machine-driven approach. Communication patterns are too dynamic for any user to bother continually updating “strength” of connections. Also, as Xobni has shown me, if you are a power emailer you’re likely to be surprised by who shows up as ranking highly. There’s no reason the same can’t be done for IM. I’m not sure that I’m going to turn my phone logs over to some 3rd party analytics company, but IM and email would be a pretty decent picture of what I do and with whom I communicate. Passive profiling of communications patterns is going to be really interesting and I think will expose really interesting information about the nature of communications. I think Xobni is on to something really cool and big as it’s delivering value to me today (even though I have to use it in Outlook) and I can see a path to a lot more value in the future.
As an aside, I think this is the best shot that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have to wedge their way back into social networking relevance. They already own the message stream and have the data they need to get a sense for who knows whom. It will be interesting to see whether they choose to open this information up and let other applications take advantage of it or whether they use it for the bedrock of their own auto-generated social networks.

Presumably the companies being targeted with this fund do not have to build exclusively for the Salesforce platform – There is isn’t anything I’ve read that makes me think there is any requirement to build exclusively for the Salesforce.com platform. I can’t imagine that would be in the best interest of the companies in question. If the requirement is that you build on the Force.com platform while retaining the ability to build a standalone business, this is not a terribly onerous condition to fulfill. I’d imagine that Salesforce will be one of several channels these companies use to grow themselves into larger businesses.

While Salesforce is a great business, I’m not sure that you can build a venture-scale business solely on the back of Salesforce – While Salesforce has built a great business around CRM and ancillary areas, I’m not sure that there is enough breadth (as opposed to depth) of activity on Salesforce.com to build a software company with a $50 million revenue run rate (yes, I know that’s an arbitrary number, but it’s big enough to be viable and interesting) purely on the back of existing and future Salesforce customers. I am, however, quite sure you could build a smaller business that would be interesting to an individual entrepreneur, though.

Salesforce clearly benefits from getting the opportunity to screen and get early access to promising SaaS firms – It seems to me that Salesforce could be a big winner here. They aren’t putting up any investment capital (as far as I can tell), are getting access to early-stage SaaS companies open to building on their platform, and the success of those companies will ultimately make the Force.com platform more useful.

At the end of the day, this sounds like a developer relations and marketing play operating (cleverly, perhaps) under the guise of an investment vehicle. Given the stakes involved and the opportunities in SaaS, I’m curious to see whether all 3 parties get what they expect out of this arrangement – it’s certainly worth watching.

Is it just me or does there seem to be a subtle (or not-so-subtle) recasting of web office suites to be less about new functionality and feature differentiation and more focus on the price differential versus Microsoft Office? Early in the web office discussion, it seemed to me that there was a lot more conversation about the benefits of using web-apps (no VPNs, universal accessibility, easier to manage and deploy, etc) versus traditional desktop applications. Repositioning the conversation around price comparisons is a shift, it seems – there are certainly folks for whom price is the major impediment but this recasting strikes me as an admission of how far the industry has to go to reach real competitive parity.

Also, it’s important to note that some of these “disenfranchised” folks who do not have desktop productivity applications on their computer don’t need them. If you are in a task-oriented job where you enter data into a system, you might as well have a terminal as opposed to a full-fledged PC. Why would you need access to spreadsheets, word processing, and email?

More than revenue and sales, this partnership could give Google much more insight into what corporate IT folks need to see out of Google Apps for Enterprise before they start writing checks. It’s worth noting that Google has one major touchpoint with enterprise IT folks today and that’s the Google Search Appliance. The folks who are managing online advertising spend are likely not the same folks who make IT infrastructure decisions. Working with a large system integrator is a good way for Google to get a handle on the key requirements they’ll need to address to make GAFE a more palatable product for larger organizations. I also wonder if spending more time with the guys over at Salesforce.com might not also be the answer – those guys seemed to have cracked this nut before and I bet they’d be willing to share parts of the playbook.

From my experience, many employees struggle to use the tools that they have at their disposal today – adding more tools in might just make life more complicated. I’m sorry, but the whole “Team Productivity” moniker just sounds weird to me. I’ve worked at a handful of places and in almost every case I’ve seen employees befuddled by the full range of things you can do with the existing tools at their disposal. Adding in a new layer of tools and interfaces to learn when the existing products aren’t being fully utilized today might make life harder (as opposed to easier) than it is today. The history of groupware and group-oriented productivity applications has shown that it’s a tough nut to crack. Often times, the individual must find a way to be productive before he/she can worry about improving the productivity of the whole.

All in all, it’s an interesting announcement. I expect it will generate modest amounts of sales for both parties but will help Google get smarter about how to sell, develop, and position their product for a more sophisticated audience.

After spending about a day using this service, I think it’s cool and I hope that other providers, namely Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, look at offering some of their core modules as things that a user could track in a personalized homepage, be it Google, NetVibes, Pageflakes, or whatever.

Also, as a user, one of the neat things that this made me realize is that being able to get a bundle of gadgets/widgets that all work really well together is very valuable — it’s a lot easier than trying to cobble together a handful of other gadgets and figuring out how/whether they can all work together.