“What are you working on?”
“On what are you working?” might be the more grammatically correct phrasing of this question, or perhaps the slightly awkward, “What work are you doing?” But the point is, you can let your coworkers and colleagues know your status updates internally only using Yammer, much like Twitter but with a co-worker limitation on conversations.
Sign up with an email address that matches your company’s domain name, and then answer any one of these work-related questions in 140 characters or less, and you are experiencing Yammer, the winner of the Techcrunch 50 and its $50,000 prize.
Yammer (www.yammer.com) lets you share status updates with users internal to your company only. With an iPhone application, a BlackBerry application, and a Desktop application, Yammer can be everywhere employees go to get their work done.
Yammer screenshot from their video demo
One nice feature lets you put a pound sign next to a word in an update, (like #newspace) then Yammer collects the status update and groups updates about that project, much like Twemes do for the Twitter site. Check out twemes.com/wc08 for examples from a recent Web Content 2008 conference. Yammer’s tag implementation lets you follow the aggregation of the updates as well, which makes following project statuses as easy as following people’s statuses. Nice.
For those of us who have been on Twitter for a while, a company directory limitation to followers “feels” a little awkward. It’s as if we need lifestreaming and workstreaming, but having to follow two streams depending on your current focus seems like splitting attention too finely.
Anne Zelenka defines workstreaming well in a WebWorkerDaily post, “Workstreaming: The New Face Time.” She says “Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.”
An alternative to Yammer may be a separate, work-related-only Twitter account, with limitations on who can follow that account.
You could look at Yammer as a microblogging tool, an internal instant messaging tool, a project status tool, or a people status tool. Overall I would call it the next generation collaboration tool for the enterprise.
