Facebook, Salesforce.com aim to create common developer network

Facebook and Salesforce.com today announced that the two companies will partner to make it easier for Force.com developers to utilize Facebook's API while creating hosted applications. According to Facebook, the new relationship is designed to create a more established development community between Facebook's 120 million users and Salesforce.com's 100,000 developers. The news was announced at Dreamforce 2008, the Salesforce.com user and development conference, in San Francisco.

The Force.com for Facebook sites claim to help developers use Facebook APIs within any of their developed Force.com applications. The Force.com for Facebook capabilities use Facebook's social graph to create social data to merge with recruiting, productivity and project collaboration applications. Force.com for Facebook will help developers build social and business applications that leverage:

• Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect
• Full support for FQL and API calls
• FBML generation for native Facebook applications
• xFBML support, profile presence support
• Custom components for Facebook Pages
• Access to the Facebook APIs directly within Force.com's Apex Code

According to a Facebook statement:

The tools will give developers a new means of creating business applications that greatly expand Facebook users' ability to do corporate work on the site, by managing sales data, organizing business events or automating marketing decisions

"We are seeing social meet CRM and the enterprise for the first time," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com. "This is the premier social graph fully integrating with the premier enterprise cloud computing company----this is the true power of Internet."

For more on the news coming out of Dreamforce 2008 -- and more in-depth analysis of Salesforce.com announcements -- be sure to read Michael Krigsman.