The Socialization of Enterprise Software

With Salesforce.com’s announcement of Chatter, it seems that this may be the moment in time that the idea of business software and consumer Web experiences converging actually happened.

We’ve been talking about this for a long time, but a couple of happenings seem to indicate that organizations are now getting on the social bandwagon fast and furious.  The Chatter announcement was one, but last week we also heard from a large organization headquartered in the Midwest, and they were sharing some great information about how they use a number of software tools in their organization.  This company recently created a private version of Twitter themselves, and everyone from the CEO on down is loving it.

Share your observations.  Are organizations you work with ready to use consumer-style social software tools for  business activities?  Would they use Facebook if it were secure?  Do they like the idea of a private Twitter?