Social-networking giant Facebook saw substantial growth in the last three months, and the company is aiming higher via a partnership with Salesforce.com.
Facebook grew its active membership total from 90 million in early July to 120 million now, said chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Saleforce.com's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
"We got more [members] in the last three months than in the first three years of our existence," Sandberg said. She also said the site now has more than 280,000 applications, small web-based programs that can be housed on Facebook pages and shared with users' contacts.
Sandberg was on stage to tout a Facebook partnership with Salesforce.com through which applications running on the Force.com infrastructure can be presented on Facebook pages. Salesforce.com offers online tools for businesses managing their customer relationships, and an increasingly sophisticated programmable foundation for customised applications and websites.
If programmers using the Salesforce.com infrastructure jump aboard, they could bring a significant new business angle to the scope of Facebook's applications, which today tend to be much more about entertainment.
That is just what Sandberg hopes to achieve: "By coming together with Force.com, we believe we are about to unleash the potential for productivity in network applications for our users."
Steve Fisher, senior vice president of Saleforce.com's platform division, demonstrated the partnership by bringing the My Starbucks Idea application from Salesforce.com's infrastructure into Facebook.
Starbucks chief technology officer Chris Bruzzo said the Facebook technology will help the company and its customers make My Starbucks Idea more useful and manageable. "Facebook is going to give us that local, personalised relevance," Bruzzo said.
