Enterprise cloud computing company,Salesforce.com has launched, a new edition of its collaboration application platform Chatter that is free for all Salesforce users. And in early 2011, it has promised Chatter.com, an avatar that is completely free and open for all users. The announcement came at Dreamforce 2010, the annual gathering of the Salesforce faithful which opened in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Using the social invitation model popularized by Facebook, any user, come February, can invite friends or colleagues to collaborate -- not just 'following" people, but documents, business processes and application data, explained Chuck Ganapathi, Sr. Vice President for product development,-- and the one  who led the development of Chatter at Salesforce -- in a privileged briefing for IndiaTechOnline on the sidelines of DreamForce.

"Chatter is the latest example of the shift to Cloud 2, the next generation of enterprise cloud computing that is social, mobile and real- time",Ganpathi said.

The tool has been a runaway success since Salesforce.com launched it five months ago.

In his opening keynote, Salesforce.com Founder-CEO, Marc Benioff, announced yet another product untethered  on the cloud: Database.com (http://www.database.com/), the world’s first enterprise database built for the cloud,ground up, to power new cloud-centric enterprise applications. Database.com is open for use with any language, platform and device. It enables developers to focus on building applications instead of tuning, maintaining and scaling databases.

“We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social,” said Benioff. Developers can write their applications in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP and other languages.and run their apps on any platform - Force.com, VMforce, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Heroku or Microsoft Azure. And their apps can run natively on any device, like an Android phone, Blackberry, iPad, or iPhone.

The database business has long been hedged by proprietary lock-ins and the Salesforce ploy of, of unleashing an free option on the web may yet prove tobe the most disruptive intervention in this niche in recent years.

Over 30,000 delegates attended DreamForce in its 8th annual edition.

Dec 8 2010