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Corporate tools such as Yammer or those based on Microsoft's SharePoint or IBM Lotus Collaboration's platforms have yet to catch fire. Their behind-the-firewall restrictions, while popular with the bosses, makes them less appealing to workers wanting to connect with business partners or the general public.

A New York City startup, Hashwork, wants to bridge the gulf between public and corporate micro-blogging with its service.

"We want to help cure anti-social business disorder," said Wendell Lansford, co-founder of Hashwork, during an interview at the DEMO conference on Tuesday.

Like Twitter, Hashwork is a free service that lets users write pithy status updates and attach files and images. Hashwork is already integrated with Twitter, meaning users can have their tweets automatically appear on their public Hashwork feed, and vice versa.

That is key for adoption, Lansford said, since it doesn't force hard-core Twitter users -- Hashwork's hoped-for early adopters and evangelists -- to re-type their updates in one more place.

The differences: at signup, Hashwork users are automatically put into a group associated with their company. Hashwork users can create more groups, either within their company or interest/affinity groups outside of their employer. They can then choose what groups can read their messages. With Twitter, users can only choose whether all of their status updates are readable by Friends or any user.

As the number of users inside a company grows, Hashwork hopes to woo enterprise IT shops to purchase the service for to give them greater control.

A $95 per month subscription lets IT administrators remove departed employees from groups, for instance. With the $495 per month enterprise subscription, companies can set time delays on Hashwork posts so they can be reviewed before they appear, or take back and delete employee posts.

Lansford acknowledged that some companies or organizations are so secretive or heavily regulated -- investment banks or some government agencies, for instance -- that even a tool such as Hashwork, which encourages while controlling their employees' public twittering, may not immediately appeal. But he maintained that with so many corporate workers already posting status updates on LinkedIn or FaceBook, the trend is unstoppable.

Besides the aforementioned Yammer and Microsoft and IBM tools, Hashwork also competes with corporate tools from Jive Software and Lithium Technologies.