Image via CrunchBaseAppirio (www.appirio.com) today announced a Facebook application that allows businesspeople to use their social network to get their job done. Appirio’s new product, MyFriends@Work, connects the sophisticated CRM capabilities of salesforce.com with the viral social networking capabilities enabled through Facebook Platform, giving users a powerful business tool to deepen customer relationships and assist with sales and marketing efforts. MyFriends@Work is a free application from Appirio available on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/myfriendsatwork/) or through www.appirio.com/facebook.

Facebook is the internet’s leading social utility. Connecting Facebook’s 110 million users with an enterprise’s core business applications can help both organizations and individuals capture the power of social networking to contribute to the business’ bottom line. MyFriends@Work alerts employees when their Facebook friends do business with their company, enabling them to act on this knowledge to aid sales, nurture leads and impact the customer experience. Here are a few of the ways MyFriends@Work can be used today:

Sales: An old friend on Facebook becomes a lead for a different department in your organization. If you knew, you could help facilitate an introduction and deepen that connection.

Marketing: A college classmate signs up for an event your company sponsors. If you knew, you could reconnect with them or offer information that could make the event a better experience.
Support: An ex-colleague files an angry support request with your company. If you knew, you might be able to help escalate the incident or smooth the waters for a better resolution.

Image via WikipediaAdam Ostrow has talked about the changes in Facebook’s architecture. Facebook is going open and will be now sharing its architecture/source-code with the entire community. Adam has talked about a new server which is being built by Facebook. The server is a called as Scribe and like any other open-source application can be downloaded from as a project on SourceForge, where developers can track updates, request features, and submit bug reports.

I think the vital feature here is ’scability’. This is something which has always been a feature of Facebook and will continue to be ! You talk about other social-networking sites and they just simply aren’t scalable enough. While the no. of users keep on growing we see outages/down-times of popular websites like twitter etc.

Scribe is primarily a logging server for managing the network statistics. It is not the thing if you’re looking to build a social network.

As Adam says Scribe might be something worth a look