Something new has just been announced here at Dreamforce – Salesforce Chatter. This opens up business collaboration, and a completely new way of thinking about your apps and interactions between people on the platform.

As the Chatter site puts it, “Imagine if your company had its own private social networking site.” – just imagine! We’re all on Twitter or Facebook right, and to me it’s all about people. Well now you can bring people into your apps too.

Even better, “With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform.” In other words, this is a platform that you can make use of in your Force.com applications. We have to start thinking, right now, about how to use this platform to enhance apps that we build on the platform. Check out the platform page for Chatter to learn more about profiles, status updates, groups, feeds, social content, security, API and more.

While it’s not generally available yet, I’m already starting to think about how to build collaboration apps.