Salesforce.com Releases “Chatter” – a first look

The keynote hasn’t even started and already there is a lot of chatter on twitter and the web about salesforce.com’s new offering: Salesforce Chatter.
In the Blog Pound, we were given books of Service Cloud success stories and chattering-teeth. The press packets were handed out, full of descriptions of Salesforce CRM’s new releases, all focused on the Service Cloud.
The biggest release is Salesforce Chatter, an enterprise collaboration – social computing mashup (http://www.salesforce.com/chatter – link inactive at posting time). It combines Content, Apps, and People in a secure environment within each company.
The features will include Profiles (user profiles like Facebook pages), Status Updates, Feeds (such as announcements when Salesforce Content files are updated or triggered announcements analogous to workflow emails/tasks), Groups (like CRM groups or Content workspaces), Social Apps (really just an RSS-type feature), Social Content (file sharing), Social Sharing (a euphemism for security model), and Twitter (referring more to the already-released Twitter integration features), Facebook (with auto-population from Facebook profiles), AppExchange (ISV partners can integrate App updates to a Chatter feed), and Mobile (allowing the Chatter features to travel).