Salesforce.com is also planning to use Chatter to court partners, who can embed and integrate the functionality in their own custom applications built with Force.com, Salesforce.com's development platform.

Chatter is available at no additional charge for paid user licenses of Salesforce.com's CRM application and Force.com.

Additional Chatter-only licenses are available at US$15 per user per month for customers that are using the Professional, Enterprise or Unlimited Editions of Salesforce.com. It was not immediately clear whether non-Salesforce.com customers will be able to purchase Chatter licenses at some point.

Social collaboration software can arguably generate copious amounts of data, particularly multimedia assets such as videos. But customers have little to worry about in terms of increased costs for data storage, Swensrud said. "We've put in a data storage model with Chatter that we think is quite healthy," although customers can purchase more if desired, he said.

Swensrud could not immediately provide details on how much storage is allotted under the base pricing model. But he stressed that "Salesforce.com doesn't want to be in the business of charging for data storage."