Here’s a video with Lynda Ting, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development, Emerging Business Team, explaining the goals of the program:

Cortex Intelligence
Cortex began as a text mining company, and spent the last five years perfecting its ability to automatically identify places, entities, companies, and other important pieces of text, making it easy to sift through large volumes of data. The company has also built sentiment analysis into its technology. For this competition, Cortex built tools that would allow a SharePoint user to automatically import tweets, blog posts, etc. based on their search criteria. For example, I could use the tool to run a persistent search on my company’s name and pull those results into SharePoint.

Calinda Software
Calinda looks to help companies more efficiently communicate by changing the way they use Email, looking to do away with the endless replies, CCs, and confusing chains of messages. To help, Calinda allows you to generate a map of these messages, allowing you to see at a glance who is sending what, and to whom. The company’s SharePoint integration allows you to pull these maps into your SharePoint hub. You don’t need to install any software to get this working with your email client.

Confer
Confer is a communications platform for companies that includes features like microblogging, status updates, and real time chat (some of this functionality can be seen in software like Campfire and Yammer). The company offers a click-to-call service, including audio recording of conversations and transcriptions, much as you’d find with Google Voice. For the SocialFest, Confer integrated much of this functionality into SharePoint.

Huddle
Huddle, which took the top prize at the competition, is designed to help companies collaborate with their partners — its mission is to be the “world’s best online B2B collaboration platform”. The service, which launched in 2007, allows companies to share files, organize meetings, and collaborate even when they are not operating within the same firewall. For its SharePoint integration, the company allows separate SharePoints to link together, bridging corporate firewalls while still maintaining the permissions and other rules that have been established by each company.

Leverage Software
Leverage Software builds social networks for the enterprise. This week, one of its goals was to build something to help companies collaborate, without forcing them to expend extra energy to use their collaboration platform. The product is called DesignSpaces, and it analyzes your Emails and extracts relevant data, like attachments and events, which it then organizes for you. In the future, coworkers can look through the workspace to find older attachments, message threads, and so on. The company has a number of Fortune 500 companies as customers, and around 1 million people using the platform.

Liaise
Liaise, which we’ve covered before, is a service that allows you to automatically extract meeting information, to-dos, events, and other key data from Emails with a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part. With its SharePoint integration, Liaise can feed this information into your SharePoint site so you don’t have to manually enter dates, commitments, and other information.

Loqu8
Loqu8 allows you to integrate immediate data lookup into your computing experience (it’s a bit like those integrated dictionary browser extensions). But it allows companies to build their own lexicons as reference, which makes it easier for employees to understand company-specific buzzwords and acronyms.  Using SharePoint, the service can pull in supporting data from databases, Excel spreadsheets, and other files.

A few weeks ago we posted 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network, a review of several hosted, do-it-yourself white label social networking solutions. Conspicuously missing from that round-up were many additional companies that specialize in the creation of social networks. These companies were intentionally overlooked in the first post because we wanted to focus on self-service websites. In this second post, we cover these remaining companies, all of which offer either made-to-order solutions or downloadable software.

When reviewing Ning, KickApps, et al., I was able to test the products first-hand by creating social networks from scratch and for free using online wizards and tools. Testing this second post’s solutions was more difficult because they all require the formation of business relationships and/or local installation and configuration. But we were able to test many of the launched social networks that actually use these solutions, and we also interviewed several of the companies.

Detailed information about the companies is presented in the interactive chart to the right, which features additional information in popups and the ability to select only particular companies for comparison.

The following companies are included in the chart: Affinity Circles, AlstraSoft, Blogtronix, Boonex, Broadband Mechanics, Converdge, Crowd Factory, DZOIC, GoLightly, introNetworks, Kwiqq, Leverage, Lithium, LiveWorld, Neighborhood America, Omnifuse, Pringo, Prospero, SelectMinds, Small World Labs, Social Platform, Sparta Social Networks, Telligent, ThePort, VMIX Media, Web Crossing, Web Scribble Solutions, and Webligo.

(Update: Awareness has been added to the chart, raising the total to 35)

Not included are Dave Networks, Five Across (absorbed by Cisco), PHPizabi, Pluck, and Village Engine because they did not respond to our inquiries. phpFox responded but opted not to fill out our questionnaire.

Your initial reaction may be “wow, this market sure looks overcrowded.” In the longer run, competitive pricing may force many of these companies to drop out of the business. However, I was surprised to hear several of them say that current demand for social networking services is overwhelmingly high. One of the representatives I spoke with half-kiddingly said that he did not actually want TechCrunch coverage of his company because he already has to turn down multiple project requests per week. It will be interesting to see over the next few years whether this demand further intensifies as potential customers realize the value of niche social networks, or whether it slackens as people get over the hype surrounding this aspect of Web 2.0.

Many of these companies are targeting large, well-established organizations with deep pockets. Scan the chart and you will see big-name media companies, educational institutions, and corporations such as Reuters, Campbells Soup, Harvard Business School, Citrix, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Fortune, Cingular, Comcast, Land Rover, American Express, ABC News, ESPN, and HotMomsClub.com (okay, so they’re not all big names).

The companies in this round-up have some advantages over those in the first round-up when it comes to providing for well-established organizations. First, these companies can protect and enhance their clients’ brands by delivering highly-tailored social network components that integrate seamlessly into existing websites. This is especially true for the subset of social networking companies that provide made-to-order solutions rather than downloadable packages. However, even downloadable software can (at least theoretically) be retooled by the clients’ developers to match an existing look and feel.

Secondly, many of these companies provide greater ownership of social network data and/or software. While a groupie running a Smashing Pumpkins fan network on Ning does not care that the network’s data is locked up in Ning’s system, Wells Fargo and Ernst & Young prefer to keep their communication systems much closer to the vest. Corporations often need to know that their data is safe and trackable for both dependability and legal reasons. Social network ownership is often ensured by putting the software and data management entirely on the client’s servers, or as is the case with Blogtronix, delivering the hardware and software together as an appliance, if demanded. However, even the hosted solutions among these companies eagerly emphasize that they respect their clients’ ultimate ownership of data on their servers.

Thirdly, several of these companies claim to develop closer, longer-lasting relationships with their clients. They provide information sessions at the beginning of their relationships, collaborate during the design process, and may even help market the social networks and provide ongoing content moderation support.

Fourthly, these companies can be very flexible when it comes to how much of the work their clients want to take on themselves. While they all provide complete social networking packages, many also support the widgetization of their features so clients can embed social networking functionality in regular pages. Some, such as Crowd Factory, also allow for the client to take complete responsibility for front-end programming and use an API to plug into a full-service back-end.

While all of these companies provide social networking functionality, they differentiate themselves in several ways. AlstraSoft, Blogtronix, Boonex, Broadband Mechanics, DZOIC, phpFox, PHPizabi, Telligent, Web Scribble Solutions, and Webligo form the minority that provide non-hosted solutions (although Blogtronix and Broadband Mechanics provide software as a service, or SaaS, solutions as well, and others might be willing to locally install their traditionally hosted platforms).

Some of them, such as Crowd Factory, Prospero, and Neighborhood America mostly concentrate on serving media companies. Affinity Circles provides job-oriented social networking solutions for alumni networks and trade associations. SelectMinds exclusively builds private networks for the employees of corporations. And Kwiqq aims to become a long-standing technology partner with the companies it serves.

A few provide unique features not found in your average social network. Leverage and introNetworks both have strikingly similar visualization features that enable network members to easily locate other members who share their backgrounds and interests. DZOIC’s Handshakes Professional product allows members to save their searches and get notified when new members match search criteria. ThePort, which has been around since 1999 and focuses on creating niche communities, differentiates itself by integrating its social networks with its own news aggregation and start page services.

Speaking of older companies, the players in this market also vary significantly in age (at least when considered in light of other Web 2.0 companies). The oldest of the group, Web Crossing, was founded in 1986, and others were originally born as Web 1.0 companies: LiveWorld in 1996, and Neighborhood America and Sparta Social Networks in 1999, for example. As representatives for Prospero (founded in 2000) attest, these older companies have needed to changed their focus in the last couple of years to accommodate a new preference for “me” technologies over “we” technologies. However, these companies also claim that their experience, business relationships, and internal structure have prepared them well for this transition and equipped them to deliver mature products.

Check out the chart for more detailed information about these companies. If you have personally dealt with any of these companies, please share your experience in the comments below.