I spent some time yesterday at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event and was amazed at how much money Salesforce had spent on branding, banners, conference material, and a strange “No Software” mascot (photo courtesy of Chris and Becca).

The other thing that struck me was how stupid the Facebook announcement appears. Don’t get me wrong, the notion that Salesforce developers can now move their apps over to Facebook is nothing but upside for Benioff. If force.com applications are surfaced across both the web (see the Salesforce sites announcement) and Facebook developers should be that much more interested in force.com. For Facebook the goal is to fill in “areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration.” Still makes sense. Facebook is trying to grow and monetize its user base; more developers and new application categories will make that easier.

For users? You must be joking. Recruiting I’ll give you, but at best those apps will have a marginal impact. Productivity and project collaboration? Any CIO willing to let employees collaborate within Facebook deserves to be fired. The concept of employees collaborating inside a social, public application scared me when Worklight first started pushing the concept a year ago and still scares me today. Even if you give employees a safe secure bubble within Facebook, the ease at which employees can simply carry the conversation from secure to insecure, from private to public should keep CIOs and CTOs up at night. I’m a firm believer that context is critical in providing the right cues for employees and in governing behavior. Mashing up a secure and insecure contexts is asking for trouble.

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