It’s been less than a year since Yammer made its debut at TechCrunch50 (and took the top prize), but the Twitter-for-businesses has already become absolutely essential to keeping TechCrunch going on all cylinders. And we’re not the only ones — Yammer is used by over 40,000 companies, and given the uproar caused when the service went down briefly last week, it’s clear that we’re not the only ones who rely on it heavily.
But while Yammer as a service is great, its popular desktop client (from which most messages are sent) has left something to be desired: It’s been a fairly basic AIR app that lacks some of Yammer’s core functionality, like search and filtering through replies, and also looked a little clunky. But tonight, that changes. Yammer is releasing a new client that offers a slew of much-needed improvements, and looks much nicer to boot.
The new client retain’s Yammer’s key features, updating with new posts from your colleagues as they come in. But it’s much sleeker, sporting an interface that reminds me of Tweetie, the slick Twitter client for Mac. The app now features integrated search, the ability to jump between Yammer accounts on the fly, improved notifications, spell-check, and support for viewing different threads in multiple windows. In short, if you use Yammer, you’re going to want to grab this ASAP.
we’re Techcrunch’s Yammer obsession again! pure bias obsession for some reason the reader could not figure out (yet).
It sounds good the way you describe about Yammer’s new features. I’ll give it a shot and see how good it works for me.
I just saw the update pop-up. I was confused at first but it took about 5 minutes to really love this update.
I also can easily switch between two company Yammer accounts, something I really wanted to have. I’m very impressed.
How do you guys use Yammer? What do the ‘tweets’ look like?
I can understand Twitter, but it’s hard to wrap my head around Yammer. It’d be nice to see how addicted companies like TechCrunch use it.
It’s like Twitter, but has more business tools, no limits on text length, attachment support (with inline display), a number of official ways to send and get notifications (iPhone app, desktop app, SMS, gtalk, firefox plugin and more).
Really, it’s just an all-around good business communication tool. Free to use too.
The app’s usability is certainly vastly improved, but the abysmal font handling and UI quirks make for a distinctly jolting user experience. Jason is wrong, this is nowhere near as elegant as Tweetie.
No thanks, sticking with the [slower] web interface.
Sweet! Let’s hope an updated iPhone app is in the works too. The reply text box is completely broken for me forcing it to stay on one line with no word wrap.
Yammer has also become essential at Twitturly. Good job Yammer, were addicted.
Keep an eye out for a lot of updates coming to the Yammer iPhone Application very soon. In the meantime, ltry our current iPhone application which is extremely popular, here:
https://www.yam...ny/applications
Also download: (blackberry app, desktop app, firefox extension, etc.)
https://www.yam...ny/applications
Thanks @TechCrunch for the coverage of the update to the Desktop Client =) We’re really excited and can’t wait to hear the feedback. We’ll be making someadditional major announcements in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Keith McCarty
The Yammer Team
they don’t use it. they just pretend like they do – to be able to advertise the name – there has to be some sort of financial benefit. maybe when yammer won the techcrunch 50 award, there was a clause saying techcrunch gets portion of yammer’s future profit? not sure yet…
This is funny.
No, we use Yammer all day, every day. First thing I check in the morning. Sometimes, it even wakes me up (SMS alerts). But I enjoy the conspiracy theories.
How about security? Imagine a hacker gaining access. Access to confidential documents and conversations of thousands of companies at once!
That’d be a nice story for you guys. Here are the official tags to use:
#YammerGate, #AdobeGate, #HillKnowltonGate, #AMDGate, #StarcomGate, #DeloitteGate
and last but not least:
#TechCrunchGate.
F3ar th3m hack3rs!
Yammer’s for me a hybrid of Twitter and AIM. The enthusiam by co’s like TechCrunch show that it’s a great tool for teams.
But seriously. Keep your pants on guys.
i really like the new client. much easier to use the advanced features.
I have a lot of respect for David Sacks, and the product Yammer has built. I’m sure Yammer (and other real-time players, like Aardvark) are building the next generation of team communication tools.
That said, I’m surprised to see little to no growth in traffic in the past 6 months (assuming Compete’s sample is vaguely representative).
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
Also, I’m not sure if 40,000 companies are actively using Yammer. Compete shows 100k uniques a month. That would mean each company has roughly 2.5 people in it, which seems very small.
Two more things…
1. I’m sure a lot of traffic comes from the apps built on the API. So they might have seen growth in usage…just not growth in traffic to the site
2. They might be doing custom installs on servers. Although I doubt this since they seem to have focused on hosted security options.
I’m sorry but how is this different than IRC? You can have group chats in channels, you can direct reply to people, and you can dynamically create new channels. Adding RSS feeds and remembering “my messages” is something you can bake into the client, it is an open protocol, you can get open source clients, and setting up an irc server is pretty easy.
Its all about packaging and presentation.
IRC? Are you joking?
IRC is for nerds, Yammer is for suits who want to feel nerdy.
Oh! Chinese yammer with products:
http://www.cnti...com/images.html
I’m sure: One day, the Chinese will even copy my lovely behind.
China has a long tradition of scientific and cultural achievements. But what does China contribute today? Apart from polluting the environment, censoring the press, killing people for their different political views, abusing animals?
Today’s China is not the China I loved. It all went down with communism and again when communism was silently replaced with cruel capitalism in the nineties.
The Chinese people are good. It’s the gov’t ( as always ) that makes it…
My team has started using Yammer a couple weeks ago as a test. We are finding it useful, but not revolutionary. I recommend you try it if you have a team. Its versatility between AIR app, iPhone app, SMS, email, and other devices is one of its strong points. AGain, not revolutionary, but useful.
nice!!!
I’ve tried the new client, but I’m not thrilled with it. It takes up much more of my screen space, even with the left side collapsed. I preferred the pulldown method of selecting different groups etc. I wished they had an option to switch back to the old layout. Nevertheless I like Yammer a lot and encouraged few of my collegues to have it a go as well.
TechCrunch would definitely prefer to see the TC50 winner be successful.
“desktop client (from which most messages are sent)”
Is that speculation or knowledge?
Knowledge.
I love the new version. Chapeau!
The only thing I miss of the old version is that when I minimized the desktop client, I only had a small icon left in the system tray. The new version has both a tray icon and an open window button.
Just updated this morning. Still disappointed it doesn’t have a built-in URL shortener.
We automatically truncate the original URL. Many people prefer this because it enables them to see the prefix of the original URL. For example, we’ll display this shortened link on Yammer:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
as opposed to one like this:
http://tinyurl.com/mf8ab
Truncating the original URL gives you a better idea of what you’re clicking and helps when viewing the Yammer Links Directory here:
https://www.yammer.com/links
We’ve heard that many people have requested that Twitter adopt similar functionality to help reduce spam. As always though, if we’re missing some rationale please let us know because we’re always open to suggestions that can improve Yammer.
Thank you,
Keith McCarty
The Yammer Team
URL shortening is a privacy tradeoff. In an enterprise tool, it’s far more important that URLs be kept private and their visits not trackable.
If a tool like Yammer used a 3rd party URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl, it would expose private company links to the wider Internet.
Truncating the URL for display without actually modifying the link target is private and secure.
I still can’t figure out why none of my #tags create a history. It used to do this until recently, now I click on a tag and it says there’s no history. If there’s no history, what did I just click on?
We’re unable to reproduce the issue you’re explaining. When we click on a #tag we’re directed to the tags feed no matter how many messages contain the tag. If this is not the behavior you’re encountering please send a help request with the specifics to help@yammer.com so we can investigate and assist you further.
Thank you,
Keith McCarty
The Yammer Team
Never bothered to deeply look into Yammer, nor did know it was like a Twitter for business, if that’s what it truly is virtually..LOL
Inside our company we use Yammer and it’s a joke. There are about .1% work relevant posts. Most posts are about good restaurants in different neighborhoods and useless other crap. I see almost 0 value in this service, other than replacing outlook public posts/folders. I did a quick analysis of our Yammer posts, out of 255 posts yesterday, I found 10 that were directly work related. Over the last month about 250 company hours were spent using this tool (255 post a day*3 minutes per post), from a productivity stand point, this tool is actually decreasing productivity at our company….. Cheers.
We joke sometimes, but we use it for plenty of work-related stuff. I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but perhaps you just need to ask people to act a little more mature?
Have you ever tried http://www.Remindo.com it’s like Yammer with project management ?
Twitter is a fad. Yammer is worse – it’s a copycat.
we used yammer for about two weeks and then stopped using it. the service keeps spamming all opf us every day which is pretty annoying I must say. Why did we stop using it? it was a waste of time for us.
I don’t like the new client. There may be nice features, however, I don’t need them. And the most important tasks (entering and displaying tweets) is somehow buggy or at least not well designed with the new layout. However, we are using Yammer in our company for about 1 months and it already helped us a lot to stay informed while keeping our inbox to zero.