On June 22nd at the Cloudforce 2010 event in San Jose we held a Chatter-focused hackathon on Tuesday night. Kicking things off just before 6pm gave us about 3 hours of hacking time, and everybody settled into their beanbags with pizza and beers quickly and got going.

The hackathon focused on Chatter functionality, and when the dust settled we saw quite a wide range of applications. Dave Carroll, Chief Evangelist, remarked that the maturity of the applications at this hackathon outstripped previous contests!

The judging committee selected the top six entries, and also narrowed it down to the top three. Then, those participants got the chance to do a quick demo to the audience. At that point, we polled the audience to vote for their favorite based on applause to determine the grand prize winner.

Our grand prize winner is Shamil Arsunukayev from Comity Designs. Shamil integrated Chatter into the Ribbit platform to allow conference call functionality for followers of a record, and demo'ed the functionality for us, looping several audience members into his demo. Great stuff! Shamil won a MacBook and iPad.

2nd place was Ryan Ausanka-Crues from Genius.com, who built a JavaScript dashboard showing Chatter messages sent and received, and additionally demonstrating it on an iPad simulator.

John Weiss winning 3rd place was our Cinderella story of the evening, building his first app on Force.com at the hackathon! John built an application where he showed sending and receiving Chatter to groups.

Congratulations to all on a job well done, and thanks for participating in a fun night. Start thinking about your hackathon application for Dreamforce, everybody!