Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Twitter lets you share short messages with the whole world. Yammer lets you share them with your coworkers (or anyone who has an email address on the same domain as yours).
The idea is to use social networking tools to enhance intra-office of intra-team communications. Users can post short messages to let members of their team know what they’re working on, ask questions, or talk about what they saw on Television last night. There doesn’t seem to be a hard 140 character limit on Yammer like there’s with Twitter, so you can post longer messages. But since you’re unlikely to be following thousands of users, it should be much easier to keep track of conversations on Yammer than Twitter.
In order to create a Yammer account you need to sign up with your company email account. Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail addresses won’t work. Once you’ve created an account for your company you can invite more users on the same domain or communicate with others who have already signed up.
Yammer’s basic service is free and includes a web client, a desktop client built on Adobe AIR and Blackberry app. An iPhone versions is coming soon. The company charges $1 a month (per user) for administrator accounts. So if you want to be able to monitor your workplace network you’ll have to pony up a few bucks. As Webware’s Rafe Needleman points out, this may be an unsustainable proposition. While I have the ability to see some small businesses using Yammer, more massive companies with a few dollars in the bank can easily spend some time building their own Twitter-like application if they want to. I’m not sure why anyone would need to pay for Yammer service.
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