Today at the Dreamforce Conference, Salesforce.com announced Salesforce Chatter, which the company describes as "enterprise collaborations meets real-time social computing." Think of it as adding a private social network into an enterprises existing cloud computing platform.
Chatter is part of Salesforce.com's new Collaboration Cloud. The company is billing the product as "Facebook for the enterprise." The key advantage of Chatter is that it can build on the existing Force.com library of custom applications, meaning that all of those apps can now have a social component to make collaboration easier and more efficient.
Chatter won't be available until sometime in 2010, but it's interesting to see Salesforce.com jumping on the intranet social networking and collaboration bandwagon. Existing systems like Microsoft's SharePoint and Box.net offer similar features and functions, but Salesforce.com might be able to lure customers who already use its CRM products or Force.com apps into migrating to CHatter.