Hello. Lately I've been looking at force.com which happens to be SalesForce.com's cloud initiative. However, what I am unable to draw is its comparison with Amazon & Azure platforms. Force.com seems to be targeting Enterprises primarily, so I am not sure if as a small shop, I should be going that way. Mine is going to be a social networking portal. What attracted me to force.com is the 'chatter' platform. I am struggling to find information w.r.t. pricing of using this platform. Most of the pricing details are written in the format $xyz/user/month. Now that may go well for an enterprise but not for someone like me who is going for a social networking with unpredictable number of user. I get a feeling that I am missing something somewhere. Further, I don't see many review about the platform. Can someone throw some light on that as well?
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4SFDC is also a platform, and the capabilities of the Java-like language (APEX) have grown significantly over time.
As for pricing, there are a lot of different options. There are light users and standard users, as well as pricing based on bandwidth. You can also negotiate with Salesforce over the pricing, but AFAIK there are not people building mass market applications based off of Force.com, largely because of these issues.
Force.com is absolutely a PaaS offering making SFDC more than a CRM SaaS player. That being said I do not see them offering Chatter as a stand-alone application anytime soon, if ever. Force.com does have it's own pricing model. This is all readily available on their web site.
As always, it depends on what you want to achieve. Force.com is ideal for forms based, data-centric application development - check out Jason Ouelette's book on Force.com if you're interested in learning ideal app dev situations for Force.com. I suspect even the most aggressive Force.com supporters would not think of Force.com as being ideal for your purposes. Zoho and Caspio offer data driven PaaS as well, but again I do not think this is ideal for your application.
If I were in your position I would try to leverage a platform already developed for social networking purposes like Ning or even something like Google Groups. Can you achieve 90%+ of the end user functionality you're looking for with free services readily available?
This article is old but perhaps some of these examples other than Ning might help: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/24/9-ways-to-build-your-own-social-network/
The Force.com developer challenges have shown you can build just about anything on Force.com, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
To the other respondents - if you're not taking PaaS, in general, and Force.com, specifically, seriously as Custom App Dev platforms then you're behind the curve. Force.com is a great platform but I do not think it is well suited for your particular needs.
Force.com fails to deliver on one of the key cloud promises: scalability. It is a very resource-constrained environment, and developing even CRM products on it can be a trial if your customer's model of their business is not in line with Salesforce's. It is definitely not the right solution for a casual social-networking platform. You will be signing up to have your hands tied for very little gain.
A couple of links for you:
http://bit.ly/7W7pmU and http://bit.ly/6mCM8q
Give a bit of a developers view on the force.com platform. You absolutely don't want to use the chatter application as it is available to an "org" but each user will need a license on your org to gain access to chatter.
There is a free edition which allows 100 users, so you could theoretically create a network of 100 users, but after that you'd have to start paying.