David Sacks, the founder of genealogy site Geni, just launched a new company called Yammer on stage at TechCrunch50. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?” Engineers at Geni created Yammer internally for the company’s own purposes, but Sacks liked it so much he decided to spin it off as its own company. He explains:
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 most the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.
It is also possible to follow specific people or topics (as defined by tags). Conversations can be viewed in threaded mode, like FriendFeed. By keeping up with Yammer, employees can see what everyone else in the company is talking about over the past 24 hours, week, or month.
This is a private Twitter only for employees of a specific company. Just like Facebook in the early days, which required a university e-mail address to join, Yammer requires a corporate email address to join.
Unlike Twitter, Yammer actually has a business model. It is free to use for employees, but if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, one of the judges of the panel on which Yammer launched, commented:
I really like this company the best.
The name is not very corporate. It reminded me of what I’m having for Thanksgiving. Maybe you could use a Yam for a logo.
The service is now live. And the company is also has a desktop AIR app, an iPhone app, and a Blackberry app.
Other Coverage
- Yammer: A “Twitter for the enterprise”
Source: Webware
Wow. It’s Twitter just marketed differently. Groundbreaking.
Twitter for companies?! Great we need twitter for every single category!!
Twitter for bird watchsrs?!
–
We’d also launched our startup today, check us out at http://www.adexcel.com
AdExcel is “The Ning for Advertising Networks with more juice in Socialized Ads”..
Let us know what u think
Best,
Darren
Cofounder of AdExcel
You’re right, unlike Twitter itself, Yammer is not one of those seemingly “brave new world” types of start-ups that amazes us with the brilliance of something truly original. However, in my opinion, originality isn’t in any way an indicator of success for a business–especially since truly original ideas seem to be rather difficult to monetize, at least in the near-term.
There are a number of businesses that have become incredibly successful by “borrowing” someone else’s orignal ideas and making a few changes that are necessary to cater to a specific market segment.
With all due respect to Evan and Biz, I just don’t think that Twitter is currently in a position to cater to niche markets like business users. The technology isn’t exceedingly complex, but their user-base is just far too diverse for them to concern themselves with making it easy for a large businesses to leverage Twitter in accordance with whatever enterprise-level features are required.
Sure, businesses could rely on Twitter itself; that is, if they happen to be small companies with relatively lax policies. However, imagine that you’re a health insurance company that has to worry about HIPAA compliance, or a defense contractor, or whatever. You COULD rely on the privacy features that are available within Twitter, but then you’re putting the burden of safe-guarding Tweets on your individual employees. Regardless of whether or not your employees are comfortable with that sort of responsibility, if you’re a large company, your shareholders probably won’t allow it.
Is it possible to engineer a custom application that harnesses the Twitter API to provide all of the benefits of Yammer? I don’t know. But I do know that if it’s possible, chances are that it would be far more costly to build than simply using a service like Yammer that’s been engineered for your specific needs.
Just remember, Yammer can afford to invest in building a solid, business-focused variant of Twitter on the premise of economies of scale; but in-house development teams just can’t.
-Ash
digg.com . slashdot ripoff with a few tweaks. need i say more?
This reminds me of the new web 2.0 service I will be launching soon. It’s called Jitters. It’s like Twitter for junkies.
“What are you smoking today?”
Not bad. Finally a business use/model for a technology that seems pointless for anyone non-tech.
Blackmail– a great business model!
I agree…Corporates are going to love being held hostage with this app…Great way to build trust in Web 2.0. Why don’t you use your own model of organisational adoption and let corporate management sign off on employees using their time in your hosted space?
When a designer downloads a trial version of Photoshop or Flash from Adobe’s website and uses it at is job, would you also say that the company is held hostage when asked to pay for the full version?
Yammer lets employees and employers to decide whether the product really does increase productivity and communication within the company. If after some time they think that it does, they can pay for full administrative rights and use it properly.
If large enterprises find this too uncomfortable a service, they need to be blackmailed. Simply block mails from Yammer at server level. Never let users register!
emal is pretty awesome too. Nice try guys, but no.
This is on the same lines as ididwork, covered by techcrunch very recently.
While I see the logic for creating Twitter for companies and I like the viral aspects and the business model, I think it has a fundamental problem. It is not clear to me that employees want to share and follow their work related activities the same way people want to share their activities and thoughts socially. If this was the case employees would have been using twitter already. I don’t see this taking off like twitter.
I can see the posts now..:
“Just finished TPS report”
“Pretending to work. Yammer wastes more time, w00t”
“Just got the boss his coffee”
etc
etc
etc
I watched this presentation and think it looks really good. It is a complete ripoff of twitter, there is no question, but it’s also a lot more than that if you actually read what it does (God forbid). My fav so far.
Just watched the demo. We are going to give it a try. Very cool.
Perhaps some people find this interesting… But this is not for me…
The Backpack Journal from 37signals is also worth a look if you’re looking for a “what are you doing” and “what have you done” tool for groups.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for my company for awhile. But the differences between the personal Twitter and the business Twitter are small but significant. Privacy and organization are of primary concern. I tried to set up Twitter to do this, and it was too unwieldy.
For people who compare this to email, sorry no. Email, like IM, is still one-to-one. The benefits of the publish:subscribe model are huge. I will definitely work on getting my company to try this.
Ok, I didn’t check.
Or
I’m stupid.
But is this actually built ON Twitter?
No, it isn’t. We have built the site from the ground up, solving many of the scaling problems that Twitter’s design had.
We also have many features that Twitter is yet to implement, like a real thread/reply system, the ability to follow #tags, and much more!
Sounds like google’s jaiku. Please don’t act like you innovated. Executed and positioned yourselves? Yes. But the concept was clearly stolen.
@Peter
Climb down from your high horse and join us mortals down here. All the best concepts are “stolen”, modified, and eventually improved upon, only to see the cycle repeat. That’s how we get progress.
What have you ever built?
Pull your head out of your ass, Ryan. He tried to make an argument about innovation. There isn’t innovation, just iteration.
What have you been cloning?
Just STFU with your “what have you built?” I’m obviously not going to disclose that while making unpopular-type comments. How about arguing the merits of a point of view.
@Ryan
Speak for yourself, puny mortal.
Signed,
The High Horse-Riding Terribly Divine Immortal Gods
Wonder where they got the ideas from:
http://www.emadibrahim.com/2008/04/11/yonkly-open-source-twitter/
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/04/1736259&from=rss
Really Mike? Twitter clone in the top 52? This is just dumb.
genius. we’d use (and pay for) this app.
bet this is the company to watch from the TC50 (or 52) over the next year. but I’d expect competition. where twitter has network effects, this requires more costly distribution.
Why not just use Twitter? They won’t charge you eventually like I’m sure Yammer will. It’s the same exact product…
You use this over Twitter to LIMIT activity to only the employees in your company. The short sightedness of idiots in these comments is hilarious. I will be using this tool and would happily pay for it simply because it limits only our employees to posts.
You can limit twitter by setting your account to private. We’ve been using it at our 19 person company, all of which are private accounts.
One more thing, the tag line. Twitter is know for asking “What are you doing?” an obvious consumer focused/ social network question. Yammer asks, “What are you working on?” Company focused, but very obviously the tone is similar.
Are you saying you don’t see the similarity in the taglines? Show us some respect, we aren’t stupid.
Niche type micro blogs that bring real value is the next evolution step. In a large/medium sized company i can see this being highly valuable. I own a small company and would never use it though.
And it’s not a twitter clone, twitter wasn’t the first micro blog. These guys have a business model, it’s private, this is not twitter.
Total twitter clone, give it up. It isn’t even debatable. It is just vertically focused and end to end, no open api, no 3rd party apps, etc.
My friend’s company just launched using twitter’s private accounts where you have to pay $5/ month to get the updates. No pay? No updates.
We do have an API which we use for our iPhone, Blackberry, and even web clients. It will be released to the public once we believe it is ready for prime time.
It’s important to recognize Twitter’s role in popularizing microblogging as a format, but it doesn’t mean that their utilization of it is the only valid one. If you actually spend some time on our site, you will see that we have many features that Twitter is yet to implement. For example, our system is much friendlier to threading, tagging and following than Twitter’s.
In addition to technical and UI differences, a locked, dedicated and secure network for your company is a very different environment to Twitter’s open space, and user communicate differently in it. At least this has been our experience when using our Yammer for the Geni network.
It isn’t “mocro blogging” dipshit, it is micro messaging.
Nice iteration on someone else’s idea…. Jaiku (google) has had good threading, tagging and following features forever.
Twitter: “What are you doing?”
Yammer: “What are you working on?”
Laconica is an open source implementation which could easily be used internally with ACLs behind a firewall.
I guess we will soon see hundreds & thousands of twitter clones soon
We just started using identi.ca as company twitter inside firewalls….
first thoughts on yammer {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/q9zymLYD4D_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”first thoughts on yammer ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/M3O4GbfHLs”}}}
is your camera and/or connection choppy – or are you nervous?
your voice sounds soft and crackly.
Also check out what we are doing over at Status (http://www.statushq.com). We launched a little while back with a different business model for businesses/groups who need to stay in touch with who is working on what and where they are.
Oh Christ no, not more cartoon people who run a web 2.0 site.
Please make it stop, stop paying this graphic designer – look, if the first group of shiny, happy cartoon people were better at running their service than making excuses – we couldn’t afford 2 more thumpers or 10Gb interfaces, etc so it is going to take 5-7 days to get your shit back online, blah, blah, blah cartoon icon of a smiling person, blah, blah – maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but argh!
This is just terrible writing….
“Unlike Twitter, Yammer actually has a business model. It is free to use for employees, but if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.”
we have knowledge sharing forum in our company, but our employee seldom use it.
I think it’s the problem of disclosing personal privacy to employer and it’s not convenience when comparing with email or event phone call
I think the worst part about Yammer is that those companies that may understand value in microblogging-style communications will probably prefer to have an open-source solution (like Identi.ca) installed on their own server while those companies that are not tech-savvy enough could use this rather simplistic tool as it is but won’t since they won’t see the value in it.
I gave it a try and have to say I like what I see. Having just tried to get a team using private Twittter accounts to share status updates, relevant news, links, etc. I can say that the process is way too hard. Yammer seems to make this drop-dead simple. I have definitely found benefit in providing a team with a lightweight means of communicating status and news that doesn’t clog the inbox like email and doesn’t demand immediate response like IM. I’m sold. I just wish they’d keep the short 140 character format of Twitter. It requires people to be much more direct and save the long winded comments (like this one) for email.
Awesome! It’s like having a pointless meeting every 2 to 4 minutes.
Apparently, Arrington uses processes similar to the Republican Vice President selection committee to vet these companies. Any of these CEOs have knocked up kids?
Actually, here at Geni we found that Yammer dramatically reduced the need for meetings since we are all up to date on what everyone is doing.
Dude,
For a moment, let’s put aside all of the positive comments on this blog entry.
What’s far more interesting than the well-deserved adulation is the sheer number of people who appear to be riled up to the point of vehemently berating your product. As far as I’m concerned, this means at least two things:
1) You have succeeded at the innovation game.
2) Your product has some pretty decent odds at succeeding in the market.
And remember, most people who are willing to invest the time and effort necessary to mercilessly denigrate someone else’s hard work are probably:
1) Total jerks.
2) Insecure about their own lack of ingenuity.
3) Not involved in a cool, start-up project of their own.
And, to “steal” a motif from Office Space (because I’m not innovating here):
“Lawrence, when you unveil an innovative new idea to your colleagues, does anyone ever tell you [insert Jerk's comments here].”
“No. No man. Shit no man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked for saying something like that.”
-Ash
What company in its right mind is going to let its employees waste time and share company secrets with a third party web site?
Seriously. Who thought this was a good idea?
Dom: Your line of thinking is flawed. Look at how many services businesses use these days that host their internal information on the internet — we’ve got stuff like Gmail for email, Zoho/Google Docs for online documents, Basecamp for project management and so on. Sure, larger companies may not use these services, but many smaller businesses do and it works just fine.
And anyway — look at banks — who would ever think of leaving their hard earned cash in someone else’s hands for safe keeping? Turns out it works just fine; in the future we’re all going to host our private data — like our money — with outsourced providers of applications on the web.
yonkly.com is BETTER, scalable and OPEN SOURCE…duh. 1 dollar a month? hello?
I somehow doubt a genuine Yammer stream would look anywhere as productive as their demo. In the real world, it probably be nothing but “Where we should go for lunch?” and “Who jammed the printer?”
Companies might end up “claiming their networks” just to shut the stupid things off so that employees get back to work.
Check out this great web site I found. Love the concept!
http://www.kcbidz.com
I like Yammer and we are going to try it out for our company. Twitter on private is not the same.
As for originality/innovation and such arguments, clearly some people aren’t entrepreneurs.
There are only 3 types of entrepreneurs:
Inventors – create something new and try to monetize it
Innovators – Adapt and modify something else for a new market
Investors – they just invest in the ideas of other people
Michael Dell, based on some of these comments, is lame because he didn’t invent computers.
Today: Multibillionaire
Richard Branson didn’t create his own music or invent the airplane, etc. – Multibillionaire
Nintendo – didn’t invent videogame consoles. Atari = dead, Nintendo = crazy profitable
Warren Buffett – Buys profitable companies and allocates capital, doesn’t invent a thing
Bill Gates – don’t even get started on Microsoft
The point is, business school (which I went to btw) has always taught that invention is overrated and the real money is in the application of an invention to solve a specific problem.
Entrepreneurs are nothing more than problem-solvers who get paid and Yammer is going to get paid.
And give them credit for having a business model from day one, unlike so many other startups.
You know, the most important thing that Twitter has going for them is the network effect. Even if another incredible service pops up, Twitter is still very hard to displace (FriendFeed). This has been mentioned multiple times on TC.
However, in Yammer’s case, I don’t see how the network effect can help the company. For example, a company with 1000 employees loves Yammer and all the employees are asked to sign up. Later, an open source version of Twitter comes out. The company can just install that on their own servers and migrate all their employees over to that system. The employees don’t even have to sign up by themselves, like how new employees get an email account.
It is true that using Yammer may be more cost effective than hosting your own, but there are also privacy and security issues here. If I work on confidential data (personal health records etc.), I have to be extremely careful of what and how I send over the web.
To be fair, I DO think that Twitter for businesses are a great idea