As you'd expect, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a constant salesman. At a dinner last night in New York City, he kept showing everybody in the room his newest baby, Salesforce Chatter, which turns Salesforce into feeds of people and customer data. He was showing it on his iPhone, which he wields as a sales weapon. (Benioff cornered one poor CIO with his iPhone demo for a good 20 minutes).
I got Benioff to show me the iPhone app on video (above). It is a supercharged, Chatterized version of Salesforce’s iPhone app which is not yet generally available. But you can see how it is very Facebook-like in that you follow a stream of updates from people you work with. Each one has a profile. But companies and customers also have their own feeds and profiles. Anyone who uses a Twitter app on an iPhone or Facebook or Yammer will find this user-interface familiar.
Benioff might be a big believer in the iPad as a new window onto the cloud, but it is the iPhone that he can whip out every time he meets a customer that is going to help him sell Chatter. At the beginning of the video, Benioff also mentions the news announced earlier today that Chatter will get its own marketplace of apps.