The tricky thing about inflection points is they are hard to see when you are in them and painfully obvious once they have kicked into high gear, leaving all those behind who were unprepared for their occurrence.

They are as inevitable as death and taxes but as eclectic and unpredictable as a Dennis Miller rant on current events. Every industry has them but the technology world seems to have them more frequently, with more intensity and with broader impact on all other industries.

So I believe we are in the midst of another inflection point and it’s being accelerated by the advancements in cloud computing.

The seeds of this one actually started back in the late 90s as the tech boom roared on unabated, generating advancements in computing, storage and bandwidth. Hardware, software and telecom companies drunk with easy capital and a temporary suspension of the belief in the sanctity of profits expanded capacity on all fronts, assuming everything would move up and to the right forever.

Then March of 2000 happened and we said goodbye to such questionable businesses as Webvan, Pets.com and Worldcom along with the launch party and Super Bowl ads for startups. When the dust settled, however, there was an immense amount of cheap everything and a strong desire to figure out how to put it to good use.

Putting all that gear to good use was inevitable because, just like nature abhors a vacuum, business abhors inefficiency of any kind. The problem was that even though technology was cheaper, it was still difficult to use and manage, and it generally took an army of expensive people to implement it. $20 million CRM projects were not uncommon and 24-month “upgrades” staffed by 100 consultants were quite normal. People still had a hard time getting the data they needed in the way they needed it so they could collaborate with their co-workers and partners quickly and efficiently.

Meanwhile, outside the enterprise, seemingly unrelated phenomena called MySpace, Twitter and Facebook took off and the social web was born. People sharing everything from their favorite bands to who’s hot and who’s not set the stage for what will upend the way enterprises think about technology and getting things done. Self-organizing communities form, expand, merge and collaborate without formal guidance or direction because an easy-to-use set of tools are provided to everyone.  And the numbers are staggering. According to Gartner, Facebook has 350 million active users and if growth rates continue that number will surpass 1 billion sometime in 2011.

But Facebook is more than people connecting to high school sweethearts or sharing photos from their vacations. Facebook is also a platform that enables developers to create applications that interact with its wide variety of features. Through the Facebook Connect API, other websites and applications can be made social, for example, by sharing content, invites and events with the Facebook community. Gartner reports that more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have already implemented the Facebook Connect APIs and protocols to interface with Facebook. More than 350,000 applications are active on Facebook Platform, and there are currently more than one million developers.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, says that these social sites have done something that traditional enterprise applications have not been able to do and that is connect applications, content and people together seamlessly. To emphasize the importance of that capability, Salesforce.com announced new functionality to their Force.com platform called Chatter, which will enable chat, email, scheduling, content management and application access both inside and outside their platform.

No better example of the power of this technology to hasten the onset of our current inflection point is the response to the earthquake in Haiti. Within minutes of the disaster, Tweets were circling the globe sharing thoughts, prayers, photos and other important information. Within 24 hours, there were sites up on Facebook with the ability to accept donations for relief. In a similar time-frame the Red Cross established the ability for anyone to text the word Haiti to 90999 and donate $10, which would be added to your cell phone bill. How long would it take you to coordinate a simple donation to a charitable organization using just the technology inside your company’s firewall?

I sense a lot of eye-rolling and sarcastic, “yeah right” being muttered under your breath and the thought of that challenge. But sooner rather than later, the Facebook model will pervade the enterprise because it is the best way for people to do what they have been doing for millions of years: communicating, sharing, collaborating and solving problems in creative ways.

Any technology that doesn’t move us further along this trajectory will be trampled by the millions of people adopting the technologies that will.

Jay Noble is Director of Cloud Computing at CSC. Follow Jay on Twitter @CSCTrustedCloud