Yammer explosion

Yammer, winner of this year’s Techcrunch 50, is “Twitter for the enterprise”. Simply put, it is a microblogging tool that limits users to a single email domain and is not accessible to the public. I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter, so when a coworker set this up for our company yesterday, I was intrigued.

At first, the only participants were the usual suspects - a small group of social media enthusiasts within our company. But… it took off like wildfire! By the end of the day, we had 16 participants and over 100 yams (is that like tweets?).

What was really neat was that the post value stayed pretty consistently high. Our free-wheeling discussion included Sharepoint behaviour in Chrome, various client projects we were working on, and how we liked the service itself. Nobody got too silly - perhaps because Yammer has the feel of a lunchtable discussion where the whole company is present.

Although Yammer has been slammed for being a Twitter clone, they seem to be doing things right in these early days. They seem to have an almost instantaneous response rate to tweets and forum posts, probably due to the massive publicity off TC50, and an API is due out soon. Their AIR-based desktop client is a joy to use.

That all being said, it remains to be seen if the tool will persist in value over the coming weeks. A question was raised about why the adoption rate at our company was so fast, compared to some other tools we’ve tried out. I hope these reasons can make it last, even just for a while.

• instant collaboration, especially between our two office locations
• minimal commitment (quick and easy to participate)
• audience limited to a private network
• the feel of a round-table discussion
• novelty