Twitter is the hot place to do microblogging right now and businesses have been seeking new ways to use it as a productivity tool for a while (including Twitter itself). Now someone new is on the scene, and they’ve morphed Twitter’s basic premise of asking “what are you doing?” to “what are you working on?” Just launched, Yammer has potential to break down barriers between departmental silos and improve overall company performance.

The idea is that e-mail, forums and instant messaging all have strengths, but Yammer creates a new sort of hybrid that increases transparency in the organization and allows employees to understand the progress of projects they consider relevant.

Yammer is also reaching out to trendy mobile users with its iPhone and Blackberry applications, according to a company press release.

As with most web startups, Yammer provides most of its services for free. Employees can create a group, collaborate, search and add new members without charge. But, to administrate or control the group you’ll have to invest a whopping $1 per month, per employee. Granted, for enterprise-wide access that could be a significant monthly investment, but it’s easy to start small, then measure results delivered by the tool.

David Sacks, founder of Yammer puts it well when he says that “people get to use great consumer Internet sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Geni, to communicate in their personal lives. Then, when they get to the office, all the software is antiquated and hard to use — that doesn’t make sense. We want to do something about that”

The potential for significant change is there, but Yammer will likely have a tough time convincing people in charge of larger, more established companies that their product is more effective than existing Intranets and communication tools. They’ll also have to address security concerns as volumes of company data will be stored on the Yammer servers.

Still, it’s great to see innovation like this taking place that’s targeted to larger organizations. Yammer will also find allies in the younger employees of organizations who expect the tools they use at work to be better than the tools they use at home.

It will also be interesting to see how Twitter reacts to its newest competitor.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 7:54 pm under Internet, Technology.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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