Salesforce has just announced Chatter 2, the next generation of its Chatter product, which has often been referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise". The new version includes a number of new features, including a desktop app. 

Salesforce’s Chatter Desktop is powered by Adobe AIR, and lets employees  post updates, comments, files and links without opening a web browser, and displays pop-up alerts to instantly notify employees of important updates. It was built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Adobe tells WebProNews  it was chosen by salesforce because  its cross-platform runtime (it works across Mac, PC, desktops, and laptops) as well as AIR’s ability to provide a rich experience. 

We asked about plans to take Chatter Desktop mobile, and while there is no announcement yet, Adobe says it’s "conceivable for the future" and that it would be "fairly easy to make mobile". 

AIR itself currently supports iOS and will be shipping Android support shortly. Adobe plans to expand to additional mobile operating systems in the future, but would not get into specifics about that. 

Of course Chatter Desktop is not the only thing new with Chatter 2. Other features include: Chatter Filters, Chatter Topics, Chatter Recommendations, Chatter Analytics, Chatter Files, Dashboard Chatter, Report Chatter, Activity Chatter, Chatter Central, Chatter Search, Chatter Email Manager, and Chatter Email Digest. 

With these features, employees can quickly find and focus on relevant posts, associate updates with other posts and comments on the same topic, receive automatic suggestions of colleagues to fllow and groups to join, create reports and dashboards for analytics, store, update, and share documents, presentations, photos, and media files, follow and get dashboard updates in realtime feeds, follow reports, track progress of tasks, search across chatter feeds, and more. 

Since launching Chatter into general availability three months ago, over 20,000 companies have deployed it. Chatter 2 features will be available with the Winter ’11 release, which is currently scheduled to be generally available October, 2010.