Business Email On Life Support ? Enter Salesforce.com Chatter

Let's face it, email has become an extremely undisciplined form of collaborative communication for organizations. From my own experience I see it every day. It starts with a question or comment, copied among a group, and then spreads, unknowingly, to become a waste of resources and time. What to do ? Well we've all been participating increasingly with social networks and there are a lot of potential there. Its just that organizations using social networks haven't been able to leverage their potential as efficiently as they could be until the advent of tools like salesforce.com's chatter.

Salesforce.com announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco this past week something called Chatter, a "collaboration cloud" platform that integrates social network features. Chatter proposed to bring the flexibility and ease of use found in applications such as Facebook to businesses, enabling feeds from business applications, content and users that can be followed, profiled and shared. Salesforce.com plans to begin offering Chatter in 2010. The end of email as the mainstream method of communicative collaboration is approaching.