Sometimes, it’s necessary to build a new platform. But sometimes, app development is about the clever use of what you already have in front of you.

And for the CIO  thinking how to integrate dozens of data silos, there are lots of lessons to be learned from smart enterprise services such as Salesforce.com and the not so likely sources such as Yoke, a Facebook dating app.

Salesforce likes to brag about how customer Burberry leverages its APIs to truly customize its enterprise applications.  Its Force.com Facebook Tool Kit connects brands to customers with Facebook profiles. Using OAuth 2.0, it can be used to authenticate a customer for a Salesforce.com site and it can be used to authenticate for apps that run on Facebook.com.

The syncing capability provides ways to create a far deeper overlap. L’Oreal is using it in a Facebook app that allows customers to give direct feedback.

Yoke is a modern social graph app that takes data from many sources and put it towards one common source.

Yoke scrapes your Facebook profile for your interests, likes, location, alma mater, and so on. Theoretically, Yoke also uses the Netflix API and music listening histories from Spotify and Rdio to match against The Echo Nest taste graph via API, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that part working in my brief test drive of Yoke (purely for the sake of research, I assure you). Yoke reportedly also uses its own API to match the alma maters of users.

All of this data is brought into the Yoke platform and collated, matching users against the 7,000 or so others also on the platform. It won’t match you with mutual friends, but you can hook up friends who don’t know each other.

The connection comes when the APIs and the open graph can get a user a date. Can you do that in the enterprise with your apps? If you can, that’s worth a million enterprise application success stories.

There’s a larger trend at work here, though, and it’s an important lesson. There’s not always a reason to reinvent the wheel.

Take a look at Radian6, Salesforce.com’s social media marketing/customer support engine. Even though Salesforce builds its own social network in the form of Chatter, it offers Radian6 to let customers extend their customer engagement practices to the existing Facebook/Twitter ecosystem and blogosphere.

More than that, though, by mining those for data, Radian6 offers an entirely new functionality: The ability to build a so-called “social CRM” profile of the customers you deal with. By taking data from elsewhere, it builds a brand new feature that’s more than just the sum of its parts.

And as the social application ecosystem continues to open up by way of APIs, developers are coming up with some really interesting integrations.

Services Angle

What Salesforce.com. Radian6 and Yoke have in common is the repurposing of publicly-available user data into something that gives the user a real edge, whether your goal is building a brand, connecting customer support or having someone to take to dinner.

There’s clearly something to the approach, for consumers and the enterprise alike. And as APIs continue to change the landscape of IT consulting, those who make best usage of the data tsunami are the ones who are going to thrive.