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The messaging platform behind Salesforce called Chatter is now going freemium. Now, most of the basic features will be available for free. However, power users will undoubtedly be more interested in using the premium features of Chatter Plus for $15/user/month. The move comes as uptake of Chatter wasn’t exactly what Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, had envisaged.  Chatter was initially launched as a private beta last February and was opened up to everyone in July with the $15 per user per month price tag for any access to the service.

Chatter is Salesforce’s attempt to get one of the leading cloud based CRMs to introduce a more social element into the workplace. When used with the Salesforce system, you can follow co-workers in a much more Facebook like way. You can follow their documents, data, accounts, as well as other Salesforce attributes and apps all in real-time – micro-managers eat your heart out! It is marketed as a real-time intelligence feed but for some it’s proved to be a bit on the creepy side.

The free version includes profiles, status updates, file sharing, group setups, filters, invites as well as chatter mobile and desktop with everything as it happens. If users decide to sign up for the Chatter Plus service then you get the following ability as well as dashboards, reports, Q&A, beefed up security with integration into the AppExchange apps if you’re using any.

Salesforce hopes that with this new pricing system, more users will be encouraged to try and eventually subscribe to Chatter Plus.

Think the New York Times and friends are having problems now?  Their ad revenue is only continuing to shrink while online advertising is only going up.  Magna Global, the marketing research firm, predicts that worldwide ad spending online will surpass newspapers in just a couple of years.

Their numbers show that the overall U.S. advertising market is barely holding steady through the end of the year, but it is sharply on the rise online and expected to rise 12.2% through 2011 (by Magna’s numbers).  The UK is expected to rise 7.7% during the same time frame.

Worldwide advertising as a whole is expected to go up 5.4% – a measly number except that everyone’s still recovering from a severe recession in the marketing business.

Video advertising, mostly TV but also probably online, is expected to be the rising star in ad spending for the next couple of years with online advertising coming in second behind television by 2013 – supplanting printed newspapers ads.  Magna predicts the online market to be at about $117 billion by then.

A large chunk of that $117B will be video at $4.7B, gaining 19.6% share by 2016 ($11.4B).  Likewise, mobile will account for $2.7B and will triple that by 2016.

Magna is probably a little bit optimistic in their predictions, but as PaidContent.org points out, not overly so.  They about in the middle of the predictions made by eMarketer and Zenith Optimedia.