Salesforce.com (CRM) has unveiled Salesforce Chatter, a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform. Salesforce Chatter will leverage the social networking models made popular by the consumer Web, allowing any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people can now have profiles, feeds and groups. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social.

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

Just like profiles on popular consumer-oriented social networking sites, Salesforce Chatter profiles include things like contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. With status updates, employees will be able to keep everyone informed of what they are working on. Instead of using Intranets or participating in endless e-mail chains, conference calls or meetings, employees can broadcast their latest status with real-time updates in Salesforce Chatter.

Salesforce Chatter’s feed will stream relevant, real-time status updates, not only from people, but also from content and apps. Additionally, the groups feature in Salesforce Chatter will allow employees to easily create their own groups within Salesforce Chatter and share updates, content and more, making it easy to collaborate with groups at work.

Integrating with other social media sites, Salesforce Chatter will enable users to filter the most relevant Twitter feeds into their Chatter app. For example, a user can set up a Twitter search for a competitor and automatically stream the real-time results into Chatter. Additionally, employees will be able to pull information from their Facebook profiles to auto populate their Salesforce Chatter profiles.

Salesforce Chatter is currently scheduled to become available in 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 and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.