Today at the RealTime CrunchUp Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the social enterprise with Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor (he also introduced us to a new real-time Salesforce Chatter platform). Benioff has also signed a pair of copies of his book Behind The Cloud, which we’re going to be giving away to attendees of today’s conference.

To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the socialization of the enterprise. Benioff recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce: Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce event, Chatter allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups within the platform, enabling them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition, developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a collaboration tool.

Below find my notes (paraphrased):

We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.

Today, Salesforce is making its own venture into the stream with Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter.

Benioff will also be revealing more about Salesforce Chatter and his real-time strategy at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday, November 20.

Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.

Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.

With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Today, the company is partnering with Adobe to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

The new offering is meant to allow developers and IT departments to build cloud-based rich media applications off of Force.com. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to meet business needs.

Box.net, the online file storage and sharing service, has just launched integration with Salesforce.com. Starting today businesses will be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to quickly access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their CRM. The app also includes support for Box.net’s OpenBox platform, giving you access to the services that have been integrated with the service (these include services like Zoho and eFax).

To get started, businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net — something that the service’s normal enterprise customers don’t have. Box.net will also offer access to the Salesforce app to customers using the ‘Business’ level account (which is for smaller companies), though it won’t come with unlimited storage.

NetSuite, a company that provides cloud-based business management software suites, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching a free iPhone app to compliment its web-based products. The iPhone app gives NetSuite users on-the-go access to the company’s on-demand SaaS offerings, which include real-time dashboards with financial and customer data from CRMs and other applications.

A competitor to Salesforce.com, NetSuite offers four main types of cloud computing software: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, accounting, and ecommerce software. In any business, mobile access makes business processes speedier, so NetSuite has tried to make the crossover between the web and the iPhone (or iPod touch) seamless.

While August and early September tends to be slow in the Valley, Salesforce.com has had a quite a big month. The CRM vendor posted strong earnings for the second quarter of 2009; just announced a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2, rolled out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses, and opened up its Force.com platform to outside vendors. Today, Salesforce.com CEO and Founder Marc Benioff is taking the stage at an event in San Francisco to announce more news and speak about the company’s strategy, the Service Cloud 2 and the power of Twitter.

Benioff says that the Service Cloud has had “spectacular performance” in a difficult economy, which is one of the reasons Salesforce is focusing on continuous improvement. Benioff says that Salesforce is the “cloud computing evangelist” as the company tries to push for platforms and applications in the cloud. Benioff draws special attention to the SMBs as clients, which can run on the same software and a platforms as large companies.

On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, “The cloud is the new dotcom.” He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.

And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.

Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).

In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.

And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (Videos after the jump).

When we talk about cloud computing, we often talk about a monolithic cloud in the sky. But in fact there are many clouds. There is the Salesforce cloud, the Google cloud, the Amazon cloud, the Microsoft cloud, the Facebook cloud, and so on. For the most part, businesses still need to pick a cloud and stick with it. But that is changing as new applications are developed to combine clouds together.

A new Facebook app from Appirio called ReferMyFriends does just that. (Yes, Salesforce and Facebook can be combined). ReferMyFriends essentially uses Facebook as a front-end for Salesforce. It allows a company’s employees, associates, or even customers to refer their friends on Facebook for open job positions or marketing campaigns.

Salesforce and Google have extended their strategic partnership with Force.com for Google App Engine, essentially bridging the two cloud-based application development environments. App Engine applications, which are typically consumer apps, will be able to access enterprise data and services via the Force.com API.

The integration consists of a Python library, example code, and testing harness that allows App Engine apps to read and write to Force.com. As an example, Salesforce executives demoed for me a hybrid application that combined a game interface built on App Engine that allowed visitors to Harrah’s website the ability to win additional points and upgrade their experience in the actual Las Vegas casino.

Salesforce’s DreamForce developer conference opens Monday morning with the announcement of a new Force.com Sites service. Sites is a new business for Salesforce, potentially extending the thousands of Force.com applications by pushing application data to the Web over Salesforce servers.

In doing so, Salesforce becomes even more of a channel for larger cloud players such as Google and Amazon, and even Microsoft to the extent that Force.com developers are free to integrate services such as Mesh and even Silverlight.

Although Marc Benioff dismisses such an alliance, he’ll have to work fast to expand Force.com outward as Microsoft comes after him from the outside in. Fertile ground may lie in harnessing Google apps and realtime services to populate Sites-enabled applications with smart information services based on targeted user behavior derived from Gmail, Google Reader, IM, and micromessaging. Salesforce can provide tomorrow’s Azure services today while using fear of Microsoft overwhelming the industry again to encourage Google and other RIA cloud players such as Adobe to federate around Salesforce as a rallying point for the enterprise.

Wanna go to this week’s Dreamforce conference but don’t have $1,200 bucks to spare for a full three-day pass? TechCrunch scored 100 one-day passes at $99 each (these are exclusive for TechCrunch readers—you cannot get a one-day pass anywhere else). These will let you attend the conference any one day (November 3rd, 4th, or 5th), see all the keynotes that day (Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Google Enterprise’s Dave Girouard), check out the booths and schmooze at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And if you go on Monday, you can catch the Foo Fighters.

Anyone interested should call Dreamforce ‘08 Registration Headquarters at 888.382.7112 and reference the “$99 Tech Crunch Day Pass.” The promotion code you need to give is: DAYTCB99