That is why companies that specialize in Social platforms for enterprise are sprouting up all over. The leaders among those are the ones that continue to better there business model and product.

I was fortunate to get an email from the PR folks of HiveLive.com to give me an exclusive demo of their product.

HiveLive is different than other companies in their space by the following four points according to their Business Development Director who gave me the demo.

1. Customizable web 2.0 building blocks (known as the hive).
2. Extensive permissions sets
3. Point & Click Interface
4. Partnership Approach

He led me via a remote desktop demo to the following examples:

1. Designers Accord Web Community – http://community.designersaccord.org

2. Serena Software – http://community.serena.com/pages/home

3. Rally Community – http://agilecommons.org/hives

I also got an opportunity to get a demo of the administrative back end which is very flexible and customizable when it comes to the modules and features that are used within a website. Areas of the website are viewable and able to be modified based on the user permissions set to each usergroup and/or individual.

HiveLive Admin area

There is no URL to the admin area but I was shown a default back end admin area to get a feel of the GUI and features.

When it comes to design customizations it is also very flexible via company providing creative assets and HiveLives intergrates it into the soluction. HiveLive is a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Which means it must be hosted on their servers with URL forwarding/alias from your company’s domain.

I was told that most enterprise companies are understandable of this when I asked about this SaaS being a potential negative to the product especially since if it is a large Fortune company with established brand and security processes in place it may be a deterrant.

As many companies are now adopting SaaS products (Salesforce.com) not allowing an opportunity to deploy on a company enterprise server may not be a problem.

Overall I was impressed with the product and look forward to reviewing others like it.

One of the earliest blog post was by Kristen Nicole over at Mashable.  Where she covers Ping.FM as a place to update your ‘lifestream’. At the time only Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Tumblr and Pownce were supported. Now, Ping.FM supports so many sites that I had to register for a few just to round out my collection of profiles within the social world because with tool, I can actually aggregate all of my accounts and post status’ and blog posts directly from one location. Ping.FM.

What is amazing is the fact that it is still so simple and the functionality is in its infancy, I am curious what additional components they will add to be able to update their social ‘network’ of sites.

Currently the supported sites are:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Plurk
4. Pownce
5. MySpace
6. LinkedIn
7. Tumblr
8. Identi.ca
9. Brightkite
10. FriendFeed
11. Jaiku
12. Bebo
13. hi5
14. Mashable
15. kwippy
16. Xanga
17. Rejaw
18. Friendster
19. Delicious
20. Yahoo 360
21. Koornk
22. Multiply
23. Yammer
24. Flickr
25. Utterli
26. Blogger
27. Plaxo Pulse
28. LiveJournal
29. WordPress.com
30. Diigo
31. YouAre
32. Custom URL

All of these social networks can be categorized as either:

1. Status Updates
2. Micro-Blogging
3. Blogging

What is great is you can also create a ‘trigger’ which is basically a hashmark type control for specific social sites that have been added to your network. For example, If I want to target only the top micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk, you can create a trigger #top and select from your list of sites only those three and then when you place your comment you place the trigger at the beginning of the comment and it only updates those three sites.

This is an awesome way to ‘channel’ messages to a certain audience within your network of sites.

Lastly, does a service like Ping.FM have ways to be able to post to all of these outside of logging in to Ping.FM proper? This is the ace card that really got me excited. Ping.FM has methods to allow a user to post from the following channels:

1. AOL Instant Messenger
2. Google Talk (GTalk)
3. Yahoo! Messenger
4. Windows Live Messenger
5. iGoogle Gadget
6. Facebook Application
7. iPhone Web App
8. Mobile App (WAP)
9. Ping through SpinVox

What’s great is this list still is incomplete as I still wish there is a Blackberry application.

Ping.FM is an amazing tool that I believe will catch on like wildfire as there are more and more social network and micro-blogging websites that has various audiences and to have a central dashboard to communicate to all or a specific audience will be an invaluable tool for early adopters and businesses.

I am curious to hear what competitors are out there such as Ping.FM that are similar or better.