Well what a way to start my blogging career at Salesforce.com! I just came out of the Dreamforce 2008 opening keynote which ran the gamut of topics from new product announcements, changing the way we look at cloud computing and finally how the vision of a music legend, Neil Young, is reinventing what is possible in the troubled automotive industry – and it is all being powered by force.com. So my dilemma is what to blog on first. I took so many notes that I am going to have to split the content over multiple entries.

I finally decided to focus on one topic that is of personal interest to me – social networking.

My undergraduate degree is in Organizational Behavior and I have been fascinated with how communities influence actions, so of course my interest piqued when I heard reference of the social graph. When we think of the social graph as it relates to web 2.0 communities Facebook immediately comes to mind with something like 120 million subscribers worldwide and growing rapidly, but I never thought I would be sitting in an business-focused conference key note and see an announcement that combined this massive social network with the power of enterprise applications such as those built on the Force.com platform. Well I was happily blown away, which has been a typical day since joining Salesforce.com, I must admit.

I am still digesting the possibilities that this confluence brings and the keynote provided a few teasers in terms of recruiting apps that allow a Facebook user to connect their friends as referrals and all of this information go directly into Salesforce.com. Salesforce and Facebook was simply one example of what Marc Benioff referred to multiple times as the combining of clouds, where we have gone beyond composite apps and mashups to an era where the major cloud providers such as Salesforce, Facebook, Amazon and Google are making services available to each other all to the benefit of the end user.

As Charlie Bell, the VP of Engineering for Amazon web services said during his time one the main stage, this is the “woodstock of cloud computing.” I can’t wait to see what is next.

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