Summary

Chatter provides the building blocks for developers to create socially aware applications inside and outside the Force.com platform. As you review the key integration features of Chatter, consider the potential it brings to drive new applications and interactions in your organization:

Chatter is itself a platform, consisting of a public data model, user interface components, and tight integration with the greater Force.com platform. This provides flexibility for any application to exercise and extend Chatter functionality.

With Chatter in Apex, you can access Chatter data and metadata from your Apex code without the overhead and complexity of dealing with the raw database records. The Chatter REST API offers the same advantages but can be used with any technology.