Salesforce.com Embraces Social Networks for the Enterprise

Salesforce Chatter will enable enterprise collaboration and communication via familiar social networking features such as user profiles, status updates, real-time content feeds, interest groups and real-time connections to user Twitter and Facebook profiles. In addition, enterprise applications will have connectivity to content feeds so that updates from Salesforce clouds such as new leads or inventory alerts will be automatically available to all members of the Chatter network.

In addition, the Chatter development platform will allow developers to customize other enterprise applications to give them social networking capabilities. Prebuilt social components will ease the customization of other Force.com applications to work on the Chatter platform. Thus other applications on the enterprise can have social networking features such as user profiles and real-time content feeds built into them, allowing the entire enterprise to have the same basic foundation as popular consumer social networks. Chatter will be accessible via mobile device as well as desktop.

Considering their real-time global reach, ease of use and explosive growth, online social networks can be considered the ultimate enterprise technology. In their private lives, consumers can quickly and easily connect to an almost limitless number of people around the world and exchange information in real time.

By applying this functionality to business enterprise computing, Salesforce.com is taking online social networks to their next logical step. Just as early e-commerce pioneers like Amazon.com played a key role in adapting the constant connectivity of the Web for commercial purposes, Salesforce.com is positioning itself to play a key role in adapting the refined interactive capabilities of online social networks to business enterprise communications.

How this will play out in terms of adoption within the enterprise remains to be seen given the general lack of standards in this space. In the meatime, there is already plenty of chatter about Chatter going on.

Salesforce.com expects Salesforce Chatter to be available in calendar year 2010.