Start-up HiveLive Monday emerged from stealth mode and unveiled its new social networking service designed to connect people and information around what the company calls Hives.

The Hives support activities between or among internal employees, partners and customers and can contain tools for collaboration, discussion, file sharing, voting and other social networking activities.

The company is angling, along with others, to define how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking can align users and information to fulfill corporate needs for communication, collaboration, business intelligence and customer support.

HiveLive made its announcement at the inaugural DeFrag Conference being held Monday and Tuesday in Denver, Colo. The conference is aimed at highlighting Web-based tools that can pull users and information together. The conference features such companies as Medium, Newsgator, thinkfree, Adaptive Blue, AOL, Dapper, JackBe, Lijit, Near-Time and Siderean.

HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform is designed so users can quickly create Hives by assembling pre-built application modules using just mouse clicks. Communities can be built around people, relationships and shared information from document files to YouTube videos. The Hive, for which the company is seeking a patent, is the glue that holds together the social networking tools, community and the information it shares or creates.

HiveLive says its tools can be used as a next-generation CRM platform. The company has created four modules for getting, retaining and supporting customers, and for gathering market intelligence. The four are: LiveLeads, LiveLoyalty, LiveInsights, LiveAnswers.

“We take not a technology approach but a building block approach,” says John Kembel, co-founder and CEO of HiveLive. “Our building block is a Hive, which can be infinitely configured to support a limitless range of social activity.”

The Hive can support familiar social networking features such as blogging, search or wikis, but also things such as voting, cataloging and archiving of marketing intelligence.

Creators of Hives can control access to features and information or turn those responsibilities over to community members.

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