You can also push content out from Elgg's conversation tool to your twitter account. This is useful if you are participating within a niche network but also want to keep your wider network of followers on Twitter informed.

Elgg also makes use of Twitter's 'hovercard' feature, so it's easy to find out more about users who come in via Twitter by hovering over their username when it is displayed in a conversation.

Many thanks to all the customers in our beta service for sharing their feedback and ideas.  We're looking forward to announcing additional features and enhancements to the service over the coming weeks.

Up until now, the service has been available on an invitation-only basis, but following a successful first month of beta trials, we're opening up the service to more users and you can now apply for a network by signing up at elgg.com.

Based in Columbia, South America, Nivel Siete delivers e-learning and other web-based solutions for the corporate and higher education markets. The team brings an impressive track record, having served more than 130 customers across 10 countries, including a number of global brands such as Mazda and Bayer. Nivel Siete's appointment will enable it to market and deliver Elgg consultancy, support and customized social networks for customers with the assurance that it is accredited by the company behind the Elgg software. You can read more about the announcement here.

We will be expanding our network of partners as the year progresses and I look forward to announcing further appointments over the coming months.

This is of interest to us here at Curverider as we believe that Elgg can have an impact in the enterprise space. Elgg started life 6 years ago as an internal collaboration tool in the education arena and moving forwards I see its core strength as bridging the worlds of internal and external collaboration for organizations.

Elgg provides a rich social layer, or hub, that provides socially-aware tools to aid collaboration internally, as well as enabling participation beyond the firewall with the wider social web.  Such two-way interaction is vital for organizations who want to use social technology to improve internal productivity, build their presence and brand externally and improve collaboration with suppliers and customers.

With elgg.com we are taking our first commercial steps into this market by offering a range of packages, from a powerful microblogging option right through to a customized enterprise solution.

We're under no illusion that there are some strong players in the field and that we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. However, given Elgg's heritage as a social platform, together with our ethos of openness, transparency and empathy with data ownership concerns, I believe we are well positioned to offer a compelling product into the mix.

You can set up a Channel, invite colleagues or followers in, and then hold Conversations or share content such as documents, videos, etc. with only the people in that Channel.  You can even filter your view of Conversations in order to see just the content relating to the Channel.  It's a great way of working with specific groups of people and ensuring you get to focus on the Conversations that matter to you.

Check out the video guide below to see how Channels work.  You can also try it out in the Demo site at demo.elgg.com.  

We've already had thousands of organizations pre-registering for a beta invitation, so invites are being issued on a first-come-first-served basis . We're still taking registrations and will accelerate the volume of beta invitations over the Summer, pending a full launch in the Autumn.

In the meantime, you can try out a Demo of the service at demo.elgg.com.  This site showcases many of the powerful features you can expect when you sign up for your own network, including the new Conversations tool and the ability to filter or restrict content amongst specific groups of users via Channels.  Note that because it's a public Demo site you can't configure the tools or theme it as you would with your own network.  We're also purging the data from time to time to stop it getting too cluttered.

Just a quick note to give you an update on some of the exciting things going on right now.

We're busily putting the finishing touches to our hosted service at http://www.elgg.com and will start inviting beta users into the service during June.  Many thanks to the thousands of people who have already registered  to be kept informed about the service.  Given all the publicity out there about privacy concerns, we think it will provide a great solution for the many organisations who want to run their own social hub, safe in the knowledge that the content and data belongs to them.

Development work on Elgg v.1.8 continues in parallel and we think you'll be delighted by the many user interface enhancements this includes.  We're planning to release a 'preview' edition late in July for piloting and road-testing, followed by the full release around October.

We're also expanding our activities with the launch of a range of support and consulting services to help customers  get the most out of their Elgg networks. More details on what's available can be seen at http://elgg.com/services.php.  As part of our expansion in this area, we're talking to a number of prospective partners with a view to building a global network  of accredited Elgg expertise.

Finally, I'm pleased to announce that Richard Owen has joined Curverider full-time as Commercial Director to work with me in building the business. Rik started working with us a few months ago as a business development consultant and his appointment is testament to the many opportunities we've identified to grow our presence and ensure Elgg remains at the forefront of social software.

[Update: I made a mistake on the timing for the preview, that should have said September not July. Sorry!]

IEC provides education around leadership development and executive coaching in the Asia-Pacific region.  Its programs offer professional coaches a mix of pre- and post- training exercises, as well as face-to-face training. IEC was looking for a way to extend client engagement at the pre- and post-training stages of their programs and encourage participation with other learners. They engaged Headshift to create a series of customised community platforms based on Elgg. 

The project was a huge success, resulting in:

• Increased visibility and community participation;
• Greater rapport between delegates, enabling them to work together more effectively at the face-to-face training sessions; and
• Improved transparency and accountability through the online community, which ultimately led to an increase in course completion rates.

Further details can be found here.  It’s a great example of how Elgg can be used to foster collaboration and improve engagement and participation in the e-learning space. 

Many thanks to Anne Bartlett-Bragg and her team at Headshift for sharing this great news with us. Do you have an example of a great Elgg implementation you'd like to share on this blog?  If so, get in touch!

In short, he’d experienced an issue not only with customer service when trying to retrieve his account, but also with the fundamental matter of ownership and control of data and the customer relationships that are key to his business.

It raises important points for the growing number of organizations looking to use social networking to communicate, collaborate and build their brands. Whilst many quite rightly take steps to exercise corporate governance by managing risks, nurturing customer relationships and protecting their brands, all this can break down if they entrust their data and marketing effort to social networking sites who can do pretty much what they want.

If you’re an organization of any kind – be it a company, educational establishment or even government-related body - it makes a lot of sense to run your own core social network and then feed information out to services like Facebook as you see fit. You can do this very effectively with open source platforms like Elgg.  Indeed at Elgg.com you'll be able to have it hosted for you, whilst retaining full ownership and control of data as well as being able to use your own branding, all for less than the price of a daily cup of coffee.

I believe organizations will increasingly look for more robustness and control in their social environments, especially as enterprise-wide social networking becomes core to internal and external communication, collaboration and brand development.