Introducing Force.com for Facebook

To the Facebook Developer Community --

Today, our cloud is your cloud. The leading social platform and the leading enterprise platform have come together. We're announcing Force.com for Facebook, which allows any Facebook developer to build and run apps in our trusted enterprise cloud. We've spent the last ten years building out enterprise-grade functionality like workflow, security, permissions, multi-language and multi-currency, and integration services on our global trusted infrastructure so that developers like you can focus on innovation, not infrastructure. With our smart cloud, it has never been easier, faster, or more affordable to build and run Facebook apps -- there has never been a better time to be a Facebook Developer!

Why the Force.com cloud? It is the most trusted and complete set of developer services available. We've taken care of everything in a single platform in the cloud: the infrastructure, the database, the logic, the workflow, and the interface. You focus on your unique idea. Isn't that why you got into this business to begin with? Two Facebook developers, Jason Holloway and Michael Dawson, of Appsorama did a lot of work to build their Facebook project managament app, Get Stuff Done, on Java. But once they started over on Force.com, it took just days... and their app benefited from all the enterprise features like security and analytics services free and automatically.

Now available in developer preview, Force.com for Facebook is a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to call out to the Facebook APIs, make FQL queries, and generate FBML and XFBML directly from Force.com's programming language in the cloud. Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, and I believe this partnership between our platforms will enable a new class of enterprise applications on Facebook. This is your opportunity to innovate for a new market of business users and join us in reshaping the future of web applications.

This year, enterprise software will be a $60 billion market. What will it look like with the social graph?

Marc Benioff
CEO, Chairman, and Founder, salesforce.com