Salesforce.com's Chatter: Social Networking Goes to Work

Robert Scoble's interview with Salesforce.com's senior vice-president of product marketing, Kraig Swensrud, discusses one solution, a sort of grown-up intranet. It also suggests a growing divide between professional and 'personal' profiles online, initially predicted to converge, not diverge.

Salesforce.com's answer is a collaborative tool for enterprises called Chatter, which allows you to follow data, documents or deals in the same way you might a person. It deliberately sticks close to existing social networking tools so it's easier for users to start using, but also includes some privacy and access settings that you might need for work. It combines the corporate intranet (employee profiles, expertise) with real-time status updates ("I'm handling a complaint from XYZ customer").

It will be beta-testing Chatter with a few hundred customers over the next four months, and in the true spirit of collaboration, will take feedback from its users on what works and what doesn't ahead of a summer launch.

While there are plenty of collaboration tools online already, and Facebook for group gatherings, there are clear benefits of creating a new, 'professional' Facebook that you can link (or not) to private profiles if you want. Chatter also has the benefit of acting as a platform for other collaborative technology. Like LinkedIn, Chatter's setting out its stall as a workplace option -- and how that ultimately affects LinkedIn is unclear. Any thoughts?