Yammer – Another Take on Enterprise Microblogging
by
on September 08, 2008,
One of the products debuted at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco is Yammer - a product dabbed by Erick Schonfeld “Twitter for companies”. That basically means that it is yet another microblogging product and a niche one at that - targeted at enterprise market specifically.
The main idea here is that there is no large universal Yammer network here - you can only join a provate corporate network for the company you work for using your corporate email address. And since this is an enterprise Twitter, instead of asking the usual Twitter’s “What are you doing?” Yammer offers us to update our statuses with the new “What are you working on?”. The functionality here is richer than that of Twitter. First, while it does not allow to broadcast any external feeds into the status updates the way FriendFeed does, it already provides threaded discussions for employees to discuss some ideas or suggestions in one place without having to track the conversation from 3 days ago (unfortunately threaded view did not seem to work for me but probably that’s because of a high interest to the product caused by extensive coverage).
All the updates can be tagged simply adding the # character to any word in the update (for example, it can be a name of a project or a customer) so that users that are subscribed to only updates related to this particular project or this particular customer could receive updates and join in the discussions.
Right on the launch date Yammer offers a desktop AIR client, clients for iPhone and BlackBerry along with SMS updates support. Besides, it is possible to send and receive updates via email and a few IM protocols - I have tested it for Gtalk and it worked absolutely smoothly.
It is a plus that there is already a business model here: while all the features are free for a user, when a company wants to administer its own network with such features as adding or removing users and messages along with additional customization and security tools, such a version will come at a fee of $1 per month per user with initial 3 months of free trial.
A few days ago I reviewed here SocialCast which sounded like a FriendFeed for companies where employees are supposed to exchange and discuss ideas while managers can track the progress of teams based on status updates of team members. Obviously, Yammer works in a very similar field and targets exactly the same market.
Back in that review I mentioned that for such a product to be adopted by companies the concept of FriendFeed itself needs to receive wider adoption, preferably in the mainstream market while in the current situation it will be a solution for only a tiny group of companies like CNET where staff may get excited about the latest and greatest technology products simply because it is a job for many employees to be excited over such products.
Here the situation is actually very similar and I can only see companies arriving to adopt such solutions once they are widely adopted by employees out of their own free will. Besides, companies that already realize they needed a solution for in-company microblogging have already come up with one: they simply used Twitter but kept the timelines private so that only employees of the same company could see each others’ updates and communicate around them in such a private mode.
Besides, there is another concern here: that is why would any company want to pay for such a product when we already have open-source microblogging solutions like Identi.ca or products like Prologue that can be installed on a company’s server in virtually no time. Actually the creators of Yammer (same people behind our beloved genealogy website Geni) admit that they created the service for their own needs as a company first and then decided it was too good to keep it to themselves only.
So the problem as I see it is in the fact that the companies that may need such a solution as it is now don’t realize that they actually need it because they have no idea what microblogging is and how it could help them as a company while those companies that are tech-savvy enough to comprehend the concept and see value in it, will probably prefer to have something very customized installed right on their server instead of using Yammer for such communications.
For additional information you can watch Yammer video demo here (sorry, it does not seem to be embeddable).
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Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Saying what you are doing/working on is interesting, but sharing what you are going to do in the future is even better. That gives you the opportunity to plan what you could do, follow or attend. We call it micro scheduling. Of course you can publish what you did or are doing, but if you publish what you plan to do, the discussion and suggestion begins until the event is definitely planned.
You can attach medias to the thread and the services will collect all medias on different services that were publish during the event (Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Qik, etc.)
That is http://www.mixin.com “what are you friends doing this week”
FriendFeed doesn’t handle code very well, so I’ve deleted my cross-posted comment (posted via that wonderful CC plugin on the site) and will simply link to it: http://profy.com/2008/09/08/yammer-another-take-on-enterprise-microblogging/#comment-1230543
Ahem… From the page source:
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<p>Requires the Flash plugin. If the plugin is already installed, click <a href="?detectflash=false">here</a>.</p>
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fo.addParam("allowfullscreen", "true");
fo.addVariable("base_url", "http://www.yammer.com");
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fo.addVariable("file", "/video/yammer.flv");
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Should work just fine if you paste it into a post on your site and turn the relative file references into absolute URLs.