Salesforce.com announced that it has acquired Dimdim for $31 million. The acquisition will help Salesforce expand its Chatter line of products, often described as a "Facebook for the enterprise", with real-time communication technologies.

The company says the move follows the proven Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration.

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. "The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site."

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said DD Ganguly, CEO, Dimdim. "Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible."

DimDim was founded in 2007. Its current offerings let users host or attend live online meetings, demos and webinars using a web browser.

Salesforce says that with the acquisition, it is following Facebook’s lead again. The company really seems to want people to think of its products in Facebook terms.