Just over a year ago we launched Sixent.com. It has been both an evolution of existing ideas and an experiment with new ones. This week, we finally left our "beta" moniker behind to better reflect our confidence in Sixent's base functionality, stability, scalability, security and relevance.

From the start, we ambitiously set our sights on redefining social networking for both personal and business use. We wanted to address serious issues around privacy control, and we also wanted to address what we saw as great opportunities to improve on traditional online community collaboration.

Our objective with Sixent was to create a personalized, easy-to-use system with an end-user focused experience.  To that end, we brought with us, over ten years of experience in developing web-based collaboration and online community systems. However, we have learned a great deal in the past year alone as we have been developing and refining Sixent specifically.

So although the "beta" sticker is gone, it will always be a work in progress for us. There is much that we can and want to do.

Below is a recap of our recent efforts and a look to the future.

Sixent Roadmap

Here's a quick summary of the most recent enhancements in Sixent:

Tag Auto-Complete

Tags are simple keywords that help describe an item and allow it to easily be found again by browsing and searching. Tags work well as categories for your blog posts and identifiers of topics found in your bookmarks, photos and files. Sixent now remembers what tags you've used in the past and will suggest them to you as you type new tags. You can even see a list of your past tags and click on the ones you want to re-use. It's pretty simple and very useful overall if you like to tag. In groups, you can browse the tags other people have used in the group in addition to your own.

Shortening Long URLs

It has become common practice on services like Sixent and Twitter to include a link URL with your short status updates. A link, however, can be very long and consume much of the 140 characters of you've got to share what you need to say. Sixent recently built and integrated its own URL shortening service that lets you shorten any URL you want to include. A shorter URL takes people to the same destination, without crowding your status.

While entering a status update or Twitter update in Sixent, look for the "Shorten URLs" link. Any URL in your status will automatically be substituted by a shorter URL such as "http://gets.to/abc". Also, when you click the "Link" option below any content item, you'll now see a short URL in addition to the full URL for that item.

If you want to use this handy service outside of Sixent, just head on over to http://gets.to and put in any URL you like to have it trimmed down.

Twitter Pods

In my last blog entry, I announced Sixent's new two-way integration with Twitter. We recently took that integration further by introducing two new pods.

The first is the "My Twitter" pod which is for your dashboard. It's a full Twitter client that let's you view your Twitter feed, personal profile, favorites and saved searches while also letting you post updates and replies. All this without leaving Sixent.

The second pod we now offer is for use on either your profiles or groups. It can pull in a single user's Twitter profile OR execute any Twitter search you like. Imagine a page in a group with many of these pods together all working to uncover conversations from people or search terms you want to follow.

To use these pods, simply click "Add Pod" from your Dashboard, a profile "Pods" area or on any group page. When adding to your dashboard, be sure to select the "Personal Pods" tab if you're looking for the "My Twitter" pod. 

Group Copy

Starting a group in Sixent takes about 30 seconds. Figuring out what you want to do with it takes a bit longer. Once you get productive in a group and find your groove, you probably want to repeat that success or share your group setup with someone else. Now you can copy any group you've started with a single-click. You can copy a group to experiment with changes, backup your content or share your setup by passing the ownership of the copy to someone else.

Group Templates

Customers of Sixent Enterprise are now able to convert any group they've built into a template. When templates are setup, people starting a group are offered the opportunity to start with a template instead of just a blank group. This can teach people how to best use groups but also save a lot of time. A site can have as many templates as it likes. The templates are just groups so they can have a customized appearance, include sample content and as many customized pages and pods as required.

Group Management

Another great enhancement for Site Administrators is the ability to search, list, and manage all groups in their Sixent site. This allows groups to be systematically reviewed and supported while keeping tabs on groups gaining in popularity and size. This section of the Site Administration area is a perfect complement to the existing Account section.

Changing Ownership of Content

A benefit of groups is that any number of people can be invited to be contributors. Group are made up of pages that contain content items which can receive comments. At each level, the person that creates the page/item/comment "owns" it.

Sometimes, however, people leave a group or responsibilities in the group change. It's therefore important to have the ability to transfer the ownership of individual pages and items as well as doing bulk re-allocations in a single step. All of this is now possible in Sixent groups.

On all pages and items, group owners will see a new option in the menus called "Change Owner". If you are a group owner and have appointed numerous group administrators, you can give them the right to "Change ownership of content" in the "Group Administrators" area of the group. 

New Privacy Options

In late May, we updated Sixent to have a new format for profiles. With that change came a fixed template for the presentation of your activity stream. We've now introduced two new privacy options specifically for your public profile. The new settings let you control who can see your public activity stream and who can start a conversation with you on that open profile. You can review and edit your privacy settings under "My Setup" (a tab in your Dashboard).

Looking ahead, we have many more critical enhancements in the works already for Sixent. These include...

Features that promote discovery of relevant people and information:

• Public timeline of activity
• Content Search
• People Directory
• Groups Search and Group Directory