When customer relationship management, or “CRM,” software provider, Salesforce.com announced its third quarter results a few days ago, the company also said that there was a big announcement coming at the Salesforce Dreamforce Conference. 

And, by unveiling today the company’s new “Salesforce Chatter,” a new secure enterprise and collaboration application and social development platform, the company delivered on its promise. 

With social media sites like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter becoming such a toehold in the telecom and networking industry, Salesforce’s new application will leverage the social networking models made popular by the consumer Web, but take a twist and cater this application to the workplace. 

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” Marc Benioff (News - Alert), chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, said. “Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me.  My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need.” 

Now, with Salesforce Chatter, companies can collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. According to Salesforce officials, the new application will provide content, applications and people with profiles, news feeds and groups, just like Facebook.

"Salesforce.com (News - Alert) has created a Facebook for the enterprise by combining real-time, familiar social networking features like profiles and feeds, with the enterprise-tested, secure sharing model required by businesses that is the at the foundation of salesforce.com,” Bruce Richardson (News - Alert) of AMR, said. “This is going to change the way business thinks about collaboration.”

In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications. And, with this new networking ability, Salesforce’s CRM cloud computing platform, Force.com’s 135,000 applications will become “social”. 

“Twitter is based on the idea that the open exchange of information has a positive global impact,” Jason Goldman, director of products, Twitter, said. “We see a lot of the same inspiration behind Chatter. We think it will enable employees to find more information, more quickly, from the people and content that matters most to them.”

With Salesforce Chatter, companies can update profiles, such like with Facebook or Twitter, and can, in fact, pull information from personal social networking sites such as Facebook to auto populate a Salesforce Chatter profile.