I have been longing for a really lean, simple social network tool which provides a basic people directory (and profiles), Yammer-style news feed for chatter and most importantly article and link sharing (but >good< article sharing, i.e. if you want to dig back to find something shared in the past or filter shares by tags, you can).
We don't really have one in "real life" (we're a 3 person startup, so no real need for it), but if we did, it would be Quoddy[1]. We would also peer Neddick[2] - an "information discovery platform" with Quoddy for even greater effect. But we're a little bit biased, as we are the developers behind Quoddy and Neddick.<p>That said, this is still pretty alpha and it's not exactly intended to be "lean and simple", and I wouldn't say that it's for everyone. But it is all open source and we have some features coming that we think are going to be pretty rad.<p>In particular we're currently working on a "Triggers" feature in Neddick that lets you hook actions to criteria around the shared links, so you can, for example, have an email or xmpp message sent if a given story has a certain keyword in the title or body, or if it's voted past a certain score threshold, or is tagged with a certain tag. We'll also be implementing "channel filters" soon, which let you filter a given channel (sorta like a sub-reddit) down to just the entries that match your criteria.<p>And we've got some mondo gnarly semantic content enhancement / analysis stuff coming down the pipe in the next few months...<p>Unfortunately there aren't proper installers yet and the documentation is pretty weak, but if anyone is interested in giving it a spin, feel free to ping me for assistance. And we'll get the doco squared away at some point and get some tooling but to make installation / configuration easier (yeah, this stuff is an "on premises" play for now).<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick</a>
The Question is, do you really want a "social network" for your startup? If yes, then Why?
There are many tools out there which you can use to connect to your co-founders and co-workers. Like:
* HipChat for private chatrooms.
* Asana or Trello for assigning Tasks and checking on progress.<p>Or to make things simpler, you can just create a private group on Facebook, and add your team members.