Big News for CRM Today! Salesforce.com Makes Chatter, The Social Network for Enterprise

Enterprise is getting it’s own Facebook! Salesforce.com kicked off their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and CEO Marc Benioff made the major announcement during his keynote speech: their new private social network, Salesforce Chatter.

Benioff has been advocating the use of real-time data for some time now, so it comes as no surprise that Salesforce would incorporate the social networking trend. Chatter is very much like Facebook, but it’s still an ambitious undertaking. People, applications, and content can have profiles, and there are also status updates that can be used to start conversations. The platform can be used to develop social enterprise applications, and all the 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter as well. No social media application within CRM seems complete without Twitter, and of course Chatter will incorporate the micro-blogging service, filtering the relevant Twitter feeds into the real-time data stream.

Native applications built on the Force.com platform can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter’s feed. Chatter is expected to be available next year, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com, and sold separately for $50 per user per month. It will be available for mobile devices as well, and will support iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. It’s a wonderful idea, and definitely takes attention away from Microsoft’s announcement that they would be integrating LinkedIn information to Outlook. Below, there is a bonus photo of the platform’s (slightly scary) mascot, Chatty.

Tags: Dreamforce 09, Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce.com, social netowrking