In the latest Voice of the DBA podcast (love the outtakes at the end, totally awesome), Steve Jones of SQLServerCentral talks about his use of Twitter. Like a lot of folks I know, he’s struggled to find the real-world benefit of it, and I really applaud his honesty. Twitter’s one of those things like MySpace – either you get it or you don’t. (Just for the record, I don’t get MySpace. I’m sure that statement will come back to haunt me later in life.)
He mentions a possible use case: private Twitter shared between employees of a company. Good news – it’s out, and it’s called Yammer.com. It’s exactly like Twitter (even the same APIs, if I remember right – I update it through Ping.fm) but it’s based off your email address, and your updates only go out to people at the same domain. Anyone can join with their company email address, which gets verified, and then you have a private in-company messaging stream. Basic accounts are free, and they have premium accounts with extra features.
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fyi, one of those extra features is being able to delete users which comes in especially handy if someone leaves your company. #learnedthehardway #hashtagsareaddictive
I tried to get my employer to adopt Yammer. It’s adoption rate is not very high yet and sadly I don’t see it growing. Given that all of our employees are scattered across the client it would seem ideal, but people either don’t get it or couldn’t be bothered. Communication amongst ourselves seems to be a luxury we can’t afford.
Arthur – ahhh, makes sense.
Rob – yeah, I’m the only guy who actively posts at Quest too. There’s a lot of lurkers, but nobody’s posting yet, and frankly, the only reason I post is because I can integrate it with Ping.fm for easier posting.
There’s going to be an event that makes Yammer helpful at Quest. That event might be PASS – for example, I could see myself posting internal-only notes at PASS saying things like, “Don’t try to sell things to Rob Paller, because his company is broke.” I kid, of course – I would only say, “Give Rob Paller extra phone calls but don’t say I sent you.”
LOL Thanks for protecting me from the sales team at Quest. 😉
Ironcially, my company had 6-8 people at a conference a couple weeks back, and I don’t think any of them used Yammer to communicate about what was going on. It’s odd.
Fortunately, one of the partners is actively involved in Twitter now and sees the benefits. But I think Yammer may die for us after the three month trial period.