Salesorce.com acquired Jigsaw earlier this year. This past week, Salesforce.com unveiled the integration.
The service integrates Chatter, the Salesforce.com microblogging platform. When a contact is updated through Jigsaw, the subscriber gets an update in their Chatter feed.
Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is an example of how microblogging services are becoming message platforms for crowdsourcing tools. Microblogging tools are serving as social middleware technologies that surface information from enterprise applications.
It reminds us of services such as Socialtext Connect, which launched in June. The Socialtext service uses the Twitter Annotation spec to connect legacy apps by surfacing events that appear in an activity stream.
Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM also shows how combining services changes the ways applications update people. In the process, the UX transforms as new filtering is required and different systems for updating. Contacts or companies are identified in the Chatter feed as opposed to traditional methods such as an email about an update.
Spreadsheets are traded for business intelligence tools to some degree as the contact data is packaged with an analytics platform.
We are more interested in how Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM serves as an example of how microblogging is emerging as a platform for surfacing events. But in this case, we also have questions about how the contacts are developed in the first place.
Anyone can add contacts to Jigsaw. That’s the power of the crowdsource model. But in some respects, privacy can be compromised. Salesforce.com maintains that contacts are contacted when they are added to the Jigsaw platform. They may opt out by going into Jigsaw and removing themselves from the database.
Contacts are also notified once a year about their inclusion in Jigsaw.
We wonder if that is enough and what other measures should be put in place when contacts are added to a service like Jigsaw. Salesforce.com does not notify contacts via Twitter or through other services. That would seem like a respectful measure to take but perhaps that is where things will go as we get deeper into the ways crowdsourcing is used for developing contact networks.
