Dreamforce 2009 kicked off today bigger and better than last year. 

You really can’t get lost in the clouds as there was plenty of signage pointing you to the right direction.

The opening keynote with Marc Benioff is less than 12 hours away, and the speculation has begun:

• Salesforce.com Third Quarter financials were released earlier today with profits more than doubled as sales rose by 20 percent. 

  “This gives us fantastic momentum as we head into Dreamforce, where we will announce our biggest product news of the year,” Benioff said. 

• Keynote special guest speakers include top executives from Google and Twitter, so why is Twitter going down for maintenance tonight?  Why on a Tuesday night when the usage is high?
• Will Larry Ellison show up?  Why not?  Benioff showed up at this year’s Oracle World in October.

Of course, another highlight will be the special general session with General Colin Powell on the topic of leadership.  Expect a standing room only for this session.

Over 18,000 people have registered for this years event, enough to fill a San Jose Sharks hockey game.

Of all the freebies and giveaways, one of the most popular items were hand sanitizers.  With the fear of H1N1, being in a closed room full of people and shaking hands every 5 minutes doesn’t help.

I had a chance to talk to several of the attendees and the overwhelming topic from existing Salesforce.com CRM users was to research how to integrate the other applications under one umbrella.  Everything from Customer Support, Financials, and HR.

All of this without owning software or expensive upfront expenses.

The Customer Support or Service Cloud has taken a whole new angle compared to last year.  Twitter and Facebook has exploded to the point where companies really do care what people are thinking of them.  One bad tweet gone viral and that spells bad news which leads to bad reputations.

If and when Google Wave comes to full fruition, I believe that will be the next killer app.  Digital conversations and knowledgebase with the ability to update, search, sort, edit and archive will be the way how we communicate.  Twitter, text messaging and social media are still very “flat” and 2 dimensional or 2D.  Google Wave is more 3 dimensional or 3D.

More updates to come.