Did you know that you can configure Force.com apps to act as a Google Visualization Data source? This means that you can now publish data from your Force.com org to the internet where it can be easily consumed by various Google Gadgets and Google Visualizations – not just on your website, but on any website that supports embedding the gadgets or visualizations.

Much of your company's data probably should not be published out on the internet, but you can certainly imagine a number of situations where exposing some of your company's data could be very beneficial.

For example, if your company is putting on a user conference, your marketing team might want to expose some of the attendees' demographic data so that the conference attendees can create heat maps of shared geographic locations, shared topics of interest, etc.

Or your sales team might want to expose a list of its most popular products so that your customers can see what other customers are buying – similar to the way that Amazon publishes lists of its bestselling items.

Or your support team might want to expose its call volume data so that customers know when they're most likely to be able to speak with an agent directly.

There are many additional reasons why you might want to publish some of your company's Force.com data to the internet. Once you do, your customers may just innovate and come up with additional uses for your data that you had never even thought about. Learn more about exposing your Force.com data as a Google Visualization Data Source.