Yammer piggybacks on the popularity of Twitter. Its stated goal: help companies and organizations become more productive through the exchange of short (140 characters) frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”
Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. Network privacy is obtained by limiting access to people with a valid company email address. Founders are former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe.
I’m the fourth member of the University of Washington network and the 11th at About.com. A slightly annoying (but predictable) issue: I can’t have two sessions open in the same browser. So if I were working on a project with someone at UW and someone at About, I’d need to use both Firefox and Safari.
The NYT wrote about Yammer last month in its BITS column. The basic service is free and anyone can start the network. Once it becomes “official” the service charges $1 per member per month.
If tweets (erh, “yammers”?) are marked with a hashtag (#), it will be easy for any sub-group to have a more private space than on Twitter. Plus, you can subscribe to a hash.
Like most networks, there are positive network effects. That is, the service is more valuable when the network grows, although there could be a point at which the effects become negative. That’s when hashtags will be even more important as a means to manage conversation in sub-groups.
A shorter version of this post appeared first at FlipTheMedia.
3 replies on “Yammer: An Experiment In Closed SMS”
Hi, Keith — thanks for the comment. I saw the Groups link but didn’t explore it. What you got in this post was a quick impression.
And Naffis, thanks for that tip.
If you’re using Yammer you might also want to take a look Present.ly – it has some added features that make it great for business use. There are multiple sign up options including restricting it to members with the same email domain.
Oh, and you can also have multiple sessions open at the same time. :)
Thanks for the Yammer post. We really appreciate it. We just wanted to let you know that we are working on various ways to support people who may be participating in multiple networks. If you use our Desktop Application:
https://www.yammer.com/company/desktop
you can add multiple accounts and easily switch back and forth from network to network. In your case it would be between the About and UOW networks.
Also, we wanted to point out that we recently released a Groups feature, which in addition to following people and tags, helps reduce noise and focus conversations. You can read more about our latest release, that includes the Groups feature here:
http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2008/10/yammer-gets-a-facelift-and-adds-group-feature.html
Once again, thank you for the post on Yammer. We really appreciate it and be sure to let us know if you have any additional questions, comments or concerns. We are very responsive and appreciate the feedback.
Thank you,
Keith
The Yammer Team