Certain Extent

So a few months ago a bunch of folks at work (lead by cutting-edge Antonio Yon) installed Yammer and now nobody is using it anymore. Why?

First, Yammer is pretty much a private Twitter for use in a corporate environment; its basic features are:

• Basic twitter bits - follow people, short messages, etc.
• Org chart build-out features (you tell Yammer your boss and who works for you and it invites them and builds out your corporate structure)
• Can easily form groups such as QA, Development, The Party for the Overthrow of QA, Party Planning Committee, Party Pooping Committee
• TweetDeck-like UI or web interface, also BlackBerry, etc.
• More features here: Yammer Features

Good things

• You can say things you can’t over Twitter such as “Lunch is here” or “Client XYZ makes me want to cut off my fingers” or even “I wish I was a lumberjack”
• You can ask very very context-heavy questions - if you create a group for your team, it is basically an open IRC channel in which you can ask questions like “in this stored procedure, what does this mean?”

Problems

• Yammer now can export their data to recruiters if/when they go out of business
• Yammer is an immature software implementation of a good idea. The 2nd day that 15 people signed up for it we all got 15×15 emails notifying us that each person was following us - henious shameful bug (Cartesian FAIL).
• The moment a “Vice President of Anything” joins the conversation cleans up and gets more useless or starts getting directed at that person (A VP of anything is more likely to join Yammer than Twitter given its org chart viral features)
• The verb of Yammer is “Yam” which let’s admit it sounds gross

Why it didn’t work here

• People used it to say stupid things “Holy crap look at that bird”
• Given that some people are on Twitter and other social networking sites, the fact that it is yet another client makes people get very frustrated if the context isn’t rich
• It spammed us
• The client crashed occasionally
• I’m not sure, but I think it got somebody pregnant

If Twitter or some other service supported and could be trusted with this functionality I think that having a private one integrated would be a good idea given:

• Twitter isn’t bought by Google (At this point Google knows everything but my safe word: “Knight Rider”)
• It is obvious that you are talking in a private channel
• You could easily install it locally like various other social bits - most companies don’t run a wiki externally, they install Sharepoint or MediaWiki on a spare server
• The “corporate twitter” is either supported by management (and your boss sends out updates and posts stuff there) or is completely outside the corporate realm (just your dev/DBA team uses it as a private IM group).

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