Yammer is a micro-blogging tool launched at TechCrunch50 in September 2008. What makes Yammer different from other microblogs like Twitter or Plurk is that Yammer is designed for the enterprise. “What are you working on” versus “What are you doing”. Of course, this isn’t really followed by the letter. It is inevitable that microblogging tools are transformed into some form of chat. When you sign up to Yammer, you will see (and optionally follow) people signed up using the same email domain as yours. There is also no 140 character limit on Yammer.
I dont think they have released their API yet, but the only clients I’ve seen are the official ones: desktop, iPhone and Blackberry.
Updates and notifications are also available IM, email and SMS (supported by a few carriers only). The Yammer website also has an AJAXified timeline, which was recently applied by Twitter also.
This is the Home screen of the official Yammer client for the iPhone. The iPhone client is nice. It works the way it’s supposed to. It’s stable, responsive and it simply works.
You can see all the members of your domain under the Directory screen. The application has a knack of hiding stuff. Tap on “fetch more” to… fetch more. It results to faster loading time and lower memory usage.
Feeds can be filtered in different ways. ALL is like the public timeline, but you are confined to those who signed up with the same email domain as yours. FOLLOWING is like your friends timeline in Twitter.
The Settings screen manages your Yammer account. My main gripe here is handling multiple accounts. Obviously, this problem doesn’t apply to everybody. Compared to other microblogs, ou only need one account and you can follow every person on the entire world. In Yammer, you can only follow someone in the same domain. Let’s say you follow your colleagues on Yammer but you also want to follow your friends in your non-profit organization, and then your charity institution, and then your fraternity and so on and so forth. Hopefully Yammer will find a way, or maybe Yammer is just isn’t designed for that.
Yammer is free, but admin privileges cost $1 per month per member of your network. Since Yammer is designed for the enterprise, it has some security featues not available on other microblogging tools. You can specify a subnet that is allowed to login via web or application. You can also set the minimum length and complexity of users’ passwords. You can add a custom logo. Lastly, you can also remove a member from a network or delete a post.