Chatter.com is live

Salesforce.com is now enabling companies to create a free, private social network.

According to salesforce.com, the public of availability of Chatter.com has already been announced.

Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter - such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds - Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people and groups. The result is a new level of productivity that breaks down department and organizational barriers.

In a recent customer satisfaction survey of more than 6,000 global salesforce.com customers, executives reported that Chatter is making their employees more productive - with 28 percent fewer meetings and 32 percent less e-mail. In addition, nearly 50 percent of the users surveyed said they could find information faster than ever before.

Chatter’s technology has allowed salesforce.com to expand beyond sales organizations, and bring a new wave of collaboration to employees across the enterprise. Companies including Dell and Reed Exhibitions have already rolled out Chatter enterprise-wide.