Salesforce Chatter offers all the features you can expect from a ‘microblogging’ system: profiles, following, status updates, feeds, groups and sharing documents and links. In addition it also pulls in data from twitter, facebook so it becomes a social datamart.

A cloud based social collaboration platform is not new, even though this is offered on a tried and tested platform that many organizations trust with their sales data. And if you use Salesforce CRM you also get tight integration with accounts, contacts, opportunities, reports and dashboard.

Even more interesting is that it is architectured to be extended. I expect you should easily be able to add new functionality through the app exchange or build your own on the Force.com platform. As Salesforce puts it: “With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform”. I’d love to see it built out to more than just microblogging, for example with blogs, wiki’s and workflows.

The product was announce mid november 2009, it is scheduled to become generally available in calendar year 2010. Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month. Even though this will also include Salesforce Content and Force.com this is a surprisingly high cost. Especially since many microblogging tools are offered much cheaper or even for free.

But for existing Salesforce CRM customers this is an amazing offering. And Salesforce joining this application space is an interesting development.