As an old bromide asserts, “imitation is the highest form of flattery.” That being so, the product designers at Salesforce pay great homage to Facebook and Twitter by closely mimicking their design in a new service called “Salesforce Chatter”. Even though it is not tightly linked to a softphone or other voice channel, it was the talk of DreamForce 2009, a gathering of Salesforce.com’s customers, partners and analysts.

The resemblance to Facebook was striking and, we were told, quite intentional. Just as Facebook, with its most recent redesign, made its core “LiveFeed” into a clone of Twitter, Salesforce has given its core Web-based CRM service into a clone of Facebook. The customary heirarchy of tabs, which include “Accounts”, “Contacts”, “Opportunities” and the like, had recently been augmented with links to Twitter feeds. But that’s all going to be a thing of the past as new tabs appear to integrate profiles, groups, status updates, feeds and input from both Twitter and Facebook.

Since sales personnel tend to be competitive, the prospect of using Chatter for collaborative sales may not be as great as the use of Chatter in conjunction with broader marketing and customer support efforts. The service can illustrate trending topics just like Twitter and Facebook. It also has the ability to support “reputonics”, meaning that team members can assign trust levels and quality to other members and their posts or responses.

Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff described the service in his keynote address to DreamForce attendees. He said that it is in test mode among internal employees. But it is being made available to customers subscribing to Salesforce.com’s core CRM services at no extra charge (above the $50 per seat per month charge). The service as a stand-alone will cost $50 per seat per month.

More detail will be provided by product managers during the course of tomorrow’s sessions.

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Tags: Cloud Computing, Recombinant Telephony, Salesforce.com