Microblogging is becoming a new trend since Twitter made all people busy telling everyone about what lunch they had or what country they just landed. But above all that, microblogging is one of the fastest communication tools to spread out message.
It can deliver your short message to anyone in your network. It works faster than email. It is truly a handful tool. David Sacks, an internet entrepreneur, spin this off to an enterprise version. This is the time when Yammer is born.
Yammer is similar to Twitter. But, if Twitter ask its user: “What are you doing?”, Yammer ask: “What are you working on”. If anyone anywhere in the world can sign up to Twitter, Yammer is just for professional with a specific company email account. So you can’t just join Yammer with Yahoo!, Gmail, or other free email service account.
You need this company email account to create a closed network so outsiders can’t just join your network and screw everything up. Only people with same company email account can join this strictly limited network.
“The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company. You can see the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.” – David Sacks
David claims Yammer could enhance company productivity. It may did, seeing that many people like to tweets so there is a big chance that they also like to yams.
A similar service called Communote is also available as an option for enterprise microblogging. It shares almost the same feature with Yammer.