Socialtext offers a number of social services aimed at enterprise businesses and now it is going for a more mainstream audience with the launch of its new product in its collaborative suite Socialtext Free 50 which, as the name implies, is free for up to 50 users.

"Many of our customers take a practical approach of workgroup use, before widespread transformative deployments," said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. "These new offerings enable more businesses to discover a new way of working without barriers and decide when to engage with us to grow revenue, strengthen customer relationships and adapt to change. Socialtext continues to exercise its Enterprise 2.0 leadership with a 'freemium' SaaS business model, while expanding the power of its social software platform."

Socialtext Free 50 offers a number of social centric services for businesses like a social networking component - Socialtext People, a micro-blogging service - Socialtext Signals, a wiki and blog publishing but comes with no support, and lacks SocialCalc. Users can purchase an additional license for $6 a month per user, which brings support for the services on an unlimited number of wikis and the spreadsheet tool SocialCalc.

The new spreadsheet editor SocialCalc comes in a market already well catered by Google and others with even Adobe launching a similar product recently. Apart from being built by Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of the first spreadsheet editor for the PC, the new tool brings more than just collaboration as it really is built on wiki principles with dynamic editing, linking and version history. SocialCalc will not be part of the Socialtext Free 50 product at first but the fact that the company is even offering a free product should speak for the current economic conditions and the general trend towards free services and alternative business models.