Salesforce.com teams up with web 2.0 titans

As Facebook increasingly takes aim at business users, the social network has joined Amazon in announcing a tie-up with Salesforce.com.

Applications developed on Salesforce.com's developer platform, Force.com, can now be supported by Amazon's web services while Facebook apps can be built and run on the platform.

The tie-up with Amazon allows Force.com users to take advantage of Amazon's hosted computer processing capabilities, Elastic Cloud Compute and Simple Storage Services (S3) to support the applications and data they generate.

The Force.com tie-up will enable a photo application to be built on and run through Force.com but then use Amazon S3 to store and access images, for example.

Speaking at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, said: "We still think there's a lot more to do [for Facebook] especially in productivity and enterprise applications."

"By coming together with Force.com, we think we're about to unleash the potential of enterprise apps on our network," she added.

Sandberg was also behind the move to bring Google Apps to Salesforce.com in her previous role at the search giant.

One example of a Facebook app developed on Force.com is coffee-chain Starbucks' customer feedback application - MyStarbucks Ideas - which was announced at Dreamforce.

In addition to bringing these applications to the social network, by using Facebook Connect developers can use other people in their network to spread the word about the apps they create.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said: "This is really the social graph meeting the enterprise platform."