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.

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.

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!]