Salesforce.com , a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software wants to change the way businesses manage their internal communications. The company has just launched Salesforce chatter in beta to 100 users. Chatter uses social network-style functionality that sits on top of their CRM system to improve communication in companies. This controlled network allows people to communicate in real-time, find people with specific skills, share news and do anything else that helps make communication lines faster.

While we may consider regular post and even faxing outdated, slow and pointless it looks like one of our favourite tools may go the same way. A new generation of Internet users now considers email slow and tedious. Instead of sending single one-to-one messages they prefer to communicate via a variety of social networks. Businesses have so far been slow to catch up. Rather than embrace the changes, they have been reported to limit and even prohibit the use of social networks. Salesforce chatter is set to bring businesses closer in line with future generations of employees that are growing up with social networks rather than email. In the more immediate future it looks like those ‘attached’ to email (forgive the pun) will have to start thinking of adapting to these new tools.

This is what Salesforce says about their product on their site

With the new Chatter social platform, collaboration features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform. Your custom apps will generate real-time feed updates, incorporate user profiles, and encourage dynamic interactions between people and groups. Soon salesforce.com customers, partners, and developers building custom applications will have all the real-time collaboration capabilities of Chatter at their disposal. Learn more

Using platforms like these in companies will change the nature of our interactions dramatically and could lead to a strongly reduced use of email. It could als greatly improve efficiencies by finding and exploiting the skills in any company more quickly and efficiently.