Salesforce Lets Loose Digg-For-Ideas
Just when you thought Digg cloning was dead, Salesforce has thrown its hat into the ring. The company best known for their SaaS CRM is unleashing their Digg-for-ideas, "Salesforce Ideas", into the wild. Although announced back in October, they are now releasing the product publicly.
Context & Ripple Effects
Salesforce, until now defined almost entirely by its [[entity:salesforce|SaaS CRM]] franchise, previewed its idea-ranking product in October 2007 and is now releasing it to the public. The move lands while Digg itself is still maturing: it rolled out revamped user profiles and friend-finding features in September 2007 as its audience expanded.
The clone arrives alongside skeptical reads of the original. An analysis published days before this release found Digg homepage hit counts are a poor proxy for site popularity, and earlier commentary argued Digg's mob wisdom is not always right even when its crowdsourced results stay interesting. Separately, Salesforce has been reported — unconfirmed — to be weighing a service letting customers share leads, opportunities, and custom objects with each other.
First-order effects
- Salesforce customers get a public venue where votes rather than support tickets rank product requests, moving feature-prioritization out of account-manager conversations.
Second-order effects
- Other SaaS CRM vendors face pressure to bolt community voting onto their own products, since a competitor is now using crowdsourced demand signals as both product input and customer-retention surface.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, voting mechanics migrate from consumer media into enterprise software as standard feedback infrastructure — with the caveat that the 2007 analyses questioning whether vote counts reflect real demand apply just as much to enterprise idea queues as to Digg's homepage.
The trend: Digg-style crowd voting is crossing from consumer news sites into enterprise software as a product-feedback layer.