Also known as Topics for Objects.
Released in Spring '14, Record Topics are set to replace public tags - Hooray!
See this good post showing an overview of the new feature Using Topics to Organize Records.
The Good
- Easy to use once set up.
- Can use in list views, which is excellent.
The bad
- Is there really much benefit over the dreaded Multi-Select Picklists?
- No reporting! Come on! What is the point of views if you can't also use this functionality in Reports - hopefully this is coming soon.
- No formulas! Stupid!!!
- No API! So it looks like there is no way to bulk assign topics to records via the dataloader or another tool (see http://docs.releasenotes.salesforce.com/en-us/spring14/release-notes/rn_api_meta.htm - no mention of topics).
- Not available to workflows or triggers.
- Adding a topic in a chatter post does not add it to the record - topics in posts and topics on records seem to be completely different.
- Note that setting this up will delete your public tags, if you have used them, though I don't know why you would have.
The Annoying
- The UI on the page to set them up is terrible. I can bet you that you will miss the save button at least once.
- You have to set this up for every object on every org (except ones created after Spring '14).
You can't use them for
- You can't use them to auto add records to campaigns because there is no workflows or triggers on them.
- You can do a view and manually add that view to the campaign.
- You can't use them to auto populate Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor lists because they are not a field that you can filter on.
Verdict
Like Tags, they look good, they seem good, but they are totally useless - at the moment. I hold out hope that they will be much better in the future.