Acquia has launched Drupal Gardens into private beta today, e-mailing out invites to the intial batch of people who signed up to be beta testers. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal which is remotely installed, hosted and upgraded. It is designed to have an interface similar to sites such as WordPress.com or Ning. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens aims to be a tool for organizations that want to build social sites. While currently on a private beta you can sign up to request an invite, and Acquia expects to transition to a public beta by spring 2010. Drupal Gardens will be available for free to the public throughout all of 2010. www.drupalgardens.com/