Who would bet against Facebook today, as it readies for the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the United States in the coming months?

Yet, amid the excitement, one thing that investors will read about is this troubling reminder of the threat coming from rival social networking efforts from the likes of Google, which can take away key advertising dollars.

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The future of business collaboration is in web-based social networks, and software vendors of all stripes are all stampeding to gain mindshare in this space.

For example, IBM has LotusLive, Microsoft has their Azure platform, and Google has Google Apps.

And at a media event today, Salesforce.com folks talked about their upcoming launch of Chatter, yet another Facebook-like social networking collaboration platform, this time for their Salesforce.com customer base.

According to Jeremy Cooper, Asia Pacific’s regional VP for marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter will be live by the middle of this year. It was announced last year in November 2009, and is currently already available for developers in a private beta. I’ll let their Chatter YouTube video explain what it is all about:

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Cloud computing and social media are big themes this year.

Every major software vendor – from Microsoft to Google – is talking it up and jumping on the bandwagon. IBM Lotus just unveiled LotusLive Monday 19th Jan at this year’s Lotusphere 2009 in Orlando, Florida.

Basically, it’s a cloud-based social network platform hosted by IBM and sold as SaaS (software as a service). It extends to the extranet Lotus capabilities (which were mostly intranet focused) and is a reaction to the trends that applications are going online and social.

My first impression from an end user perspective is that it is a sort of a Facebook for business use. From a business perspective, it is an enterprise set of extranet tools that ties in with backend Lotus systems.

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