Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.

I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.

First posted on CloudAve

A live blog of the presentation….

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, and Alina Fu, Product Manager, Social Computing talk about the SharePoint 2010 offering.

An interesting approach – Christian and Alina ran a “speed dating” session trying to message the major thrust of 2010. Christian pushed the big customers who use SharePoint to collaborate and, with honesty, admitted the failings of an ActiveX-centric approach.

Personal connections, finding subject matter experts, consumer features for the enterprise. 2010 has a dynamic newsfeed directly to an individual site. Personal profiling linked with contextual search.

2010 has a better user experience across blogs and wikis – unleashing the creativity of the users. Enabling the use of podcasts within the product.

User rating and commenting of content inside or outside of SharePoint. Tagging linked to newsfeeds.

The security question - “It’s Microsoft so it’s safe”. Content management extends to the social media content.

Flexibility – 2010 enables advances customization, within the browser for an individual user or a team. A full range of APIs and tools to customize the look, feel and functionality.

And the speed date is over… And the audience goes wild… (not so much)

50 Essential Strategies for Creating a Successful Web 2.0 Product

Author: Dion Hinchcliffe, 1/26/2009. Reposted from Social Computing Magazine.