New Social Collaboration Platform to enter public testing.

We've been developing a new application for online social collaboration and project management called Sneffel, and we think its ready for public testing. We did an initial, private release a few weeks ago to only three small user groups: one at the University College in London, one at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, and one at Grace University in Omaha, Nebraska. They all received the first alpha product well, and for the past month or so and we've been busy collecting data, paper-prototyping, programming, designing, and generally getting ready for our first public release. Nothing is permanent or official yet, but here's what we think Sneffel will do:

Allow users to connect with others in real time.
Organize, create, and share project information.
Upload, share, and create documents and files.

Here's an example of how one might use Sneffel: Our hero Bob is a student at the Colorado School of Mines. He stayed up all night on some other social networking site and ignored his physics homework that's due the next morning. In a panic, he headed over to Sneffel and created a new project for his homework. He quickly invited other friends, Jack, and Mary (all who need to do their homework as well) and John from another school sees their new project and joins just for fun. Bob uploaded the homework documents so everyone can see them. He and Jack worked through problems over Sneffel, while Mary and John gave them some hints and tips in real time. John from the other school sees a connection with an upper level class he's taking, and forks off a new project, and invites some of his classmates to join him in his project, without disrupting Bob, Jack, and Mary.

We hope not to limit Sneffel to purely an academic environment, but so far, our user groups have responded well. We're also looking at using Sneffel with the OpenID and OpenSocial, but probably not for our first public release. You can keep an eye out for our new social networking/collaboration platform towards the end of May, and tentatively on May 22nd.