Yammer (the private Twitter)
So Yammer won the TechCrunch50 this year. (Congrats to the Yammer team.)
For those of you who did not all ready know Yammer is a sort of private Twitter that you can set up for your company. This is cool because (as I said in a prior post) the way that Twitter works makes me think that before it was release to the general population, it was being used as a internal communication tool for its original parent company Obviously.
Twitter is a simple, beautiful, and eloquent system that was set up to let people who are not in the same place keep up with what they are doing. I use it to see what people who live in different states, and countries are up to. People can update and view Tiwtter from the web, ther phone, or various third party applications. The fact that people are limited to 140 characters forces them to get to the point (in ways that email and voice mail don't). In many ways Twitter is the PREFECT communication tool for a company.
Only problem is that it is not private. I'm positive that many private (and I'd even say publicly held) companies have saw what Twitter does and thought to themselves something along the lines of "If only I could have something like this to help communication in my company."
Enter Yammer: The company that created Yammer saw a desire for a tool, and they meet that desire.
Now companies can create private Twitters that only their employees can use, and because it is private they can talk about all the "secret" things openly with out violating the NDAs that they singed.
Totally brilliant.
To be honest I'm kind of shocked that Twitter did not meet this need by offering some sort of paied private sub-system that a company could use. I guess it might have been because up until recently Twitter was not all that stable (as evidenced by all of the fail whale sighting that we all had to deal with up until a few months ago.)
I totally expect to see both large and small scale companies using Yammer.
-I see the CEO of a big company using it to keep his entire company up to day on things, and to see at a glance what different people in his company are doing.
-I see the small company where people do lots of work out of the office using it to keep everyone on the same page.
I would not be susprised to see either Twitter or yammer go public some time soon. I wish that I could invest in them now. :)
-N
For those of you who did not all ready know Yammer is a sort of private Twitter that you can set up for your company. This is cool because (as I said in a prior post) the way that Twitter works makes me think that before it was release to the general population, it was being used as a internal communication tool for its original parent company Obviously.
Twitter is a simple, beautiful, and eloquent system that was set up to let people who are not in the same place keep up with what they are doing. I use it to see what people who live in different states, and countries are up to. People can update and view Tiwtter from the web, ther phone, or various third party applications. The fact that people are limited to 140 characters forces them to get to the point (in ways that email and voice mail don't). In many ways Twitter is the PREFECT communication tool for a company.
Only problem is that it is not private. I'm positive that many private (and I'd even say publicly held) companies have saw what Twitter does and thought to themselves something along the lines of "If only I could have something like this to help communication in my company."
Enter Yammer: The company that created Yammer saw a desire for a tool, and they meet that desire.
Now companies can create private Twitters that only their employees can use, and because it is private they can talk about all the "secret" things openly with out violating the NDAs that they singed.
Totally brilliant.
To be honest I'm kind of shocked that Twitter did not meet this need by offering some sort of paied private sub-system that a company could use. I guess it might have been because up until recently Twitter was not all that stable (as evidenced by all of the fail whale sighting that we all had to deal with up until a few months ago.)
I totally expect to see both large and small scale companies using Yammer.
-I see the CEO of a big company using it to keep his entire company up to day on things, and to see at a glance what different people in his company are doing.
-I see the small company where people do lots of work out of the office using it to keep everyone on the same page.
I would not be susprised to see either Twitter or yammer go public some time soon. I wish that I could invest in them now. :)
-N
