It’s been just under a year since Yammer, the ‘Twitter for businesses’, launched at TechCrunch 50 and won the conference’s top prize. Since then the service has seen steady growth, with over 40,000 networks signed up for the service. It’s also become an absolutely essential tool inside the TechCrunch office, which is why I grew alarmed when I noticed that the service is currently down. But a quick visit to the site’s blog reveals that this was planned downtime, and for good reason: when Yammer comes back up, it will feature a host of impressive features in what may be the service’s biggest update since launch. We got in touch with CEO David Sacks, who outlined what we can expect when the service comes back later tonight.
Some of the new features include:
-
Revamped iPhone App — The big new feature here is Push notifications, which will allow you to get updated whenever you get a message without having to burn through SMS messages. The app also integrates a camera mode for taking photos, improved text entry (you can auto-save drafts and type in landscape mode), and improved performance. The app is currently pending approval in the app store, so we may have to wait a few more days to download it.
- Likes — Yammer is adopting the feature popularized by Friendfeed and later “borrowed” by Facebook. However, Likes in Yammer aren’t just virtual pats on the back — every time you Like something, it will be shared with everyone in your network, which means that Liked messages grow virally.
- Threads — You’ll now be able to view messages in a threaded view, in a manner that looks very similar to Facebook, or you can revert back to the Twitter-like stream Yammer has used until now. The stream works fine for small groups, but it can become unwieldly when multiple conversations are going on at once, which makes the threaded view a welcome addition. For now this will be limited to the web version, but the desktop client will support it in the next few weeks.
- Improved Search — Search has been improved to include a number of advanced options, including limiting searches to a specific user or to coworkers in a certain group.
Other improvements include more security options (you can make passwords automatically expire after a certain time period), a ‘broadcast’ mode for network admins that lets them send a message throughout an entire network, and an improved interface.
All in all this is a great update for Yammer, which continues to improve on an already-solid product. Last month Yammer unveiled a rebuilt client for Adobe AIR, which was also a big improvement over the old app. That said, I could do without AIR’s quirks — I wish Yammer offered some native clients.
cool
Yammer isn’t a startup, TechCrunch. Arrington, Sacks, and Thiel need to wake up and realize this insider BullSHIT is ridiculous.
Can’t wait to see the “startup” who wins at TC50. $5k says it’s someone who has taken an angel round from one of Arrington’s man-crushes.
We’ve been using Yammer constantly at Photojojo, and the AIR app was chewing up resources. Turns out, there is a third-party native OS X client called Gabble.
It’s pretty, lightweight, and MUCH better than the official client.
http://erikhint...oftware/gabble/
Amit
p.s. No association with the the author, just want to encourage further development.
Nice!!!yammer-Twitter for business tool is improving. Push notifications used in the renovated i-Phone application are quite impressive..A rebuilt client for Adobe AIR, it is an innovative improvement..they can gain some new clients too…
irc?
Gabble is a decent Mac client.
Gabble definitely is the best choice for OSX, but there’s still quite a long way to go.. Would be nice if Yammer bought Gabble and finished it..
Wow, threaded conversations, man, innovation! I remember threaded forums from the few months I started using the internet. You know Usenet kind of has threaded conversations. ANd then there are forums and well you know, every other site out there. But that’s ok, it’s a big deal! A big deal like every other post on this blog, big enough in fact that it justifies encourage people to spam’s twitter search with pointless retweets of the same techchrunch story hundreds of times breaking search for whatever Techcrunch feels like they want to post about for the next few days. Thanks guys!
+1
Good article. I didn’t know about these features.
Hmm, very interesting.. looks like another big one is coming. Gotta check it out!
Love the concept of Yammer. Seems you need a decent size company 25+ for it to really be useful. These are great features.
Nope. The value kicks in even with just one person as a way to share, store and search ideas, data points, etc.
The biggest disadvantage of Yammer is, that you cannot deploy it locally. That makes such a product difficult to introduce in Germany.
We have an implementation of Laconi.ca instead, that has other problems.
See here (German content):
http://www.yout...h?v=ktDBko92_yA
http://blog.sei...im-unternehmen/
http://blog.sei...er-im-intranet/
If it’s hard to introduce a hosted service in Germany, that’s Germany’s problem.
We launched threaded conversations on Edmodo 3 weeks ago, sigh. Guess you need venture backed funding and win Techcrunch 50 to get an announcement like this.
No. Just don’t be a jerkoff.
Still think Yammer is garbage, and of no real use for most companies. A wiki is for more useful and powerful and can duplicate and exceed all the functionalities of Yammer.
Yammer is a huge part of how we talk internally. moved to the paid version a few months ago, wouldn’t give it up for anything now.
Fair enough. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong.
I beleive in Yammer’s vision and would like to give it a trial at my company.
However, Yammer’s search is so unbearably slow as to make it completely useless. I just tried it again, and am consistently getting 12 second page load times. There’s no way anyone I work with will tolerate that, making Yammer a nonstarter.
Yammer was used in our company for about 3 days then left for dead because we all realized that nearly all functionality is already on IM and/or the company wiki.
I think Michael likes toys and this is the latest in a very very LONG list over the years.
We’ve been trialling Yammer for a while and it is of massive benefit. In a 70,000+ plus organisation, connecting 2,000 staff in the trial alone has been fantastic – to connect, get realtime answers and useful information from people we otherwise wouldn’t connect with or even know existed.
Yammer definitely has its place in organisations.
Nice one!!! So there we have another one, Must check by everyone…
Yammer really is a huge part. you are right MIchael.
Has anyone else lost their Yammer favorites with this new like feature? I’m not happy about them losing my data.
Arthur, we’ve restored your ‘Favorites’ as ‘Bookmarks’ so all your data is back.
It’s a nice technology, I wish our organization use it soon, so that we can easily communicate and discuss important stuff among our colleagues.
Does no one else see this getting sidelined by Google Wave (when it is eventually released)? Wave looks like it will have more functionality, plus integration into other Google products.
Add onto that the fact that it will be practically free (AFAIK) I’m not sure what Yammer will offer that Wave won’t??
Granted, you must be invited to a Wave, and Yammer is more “twitter”-like, but for conversations, the functionality of Wave seems to be vastly superior. Adding the ability to add people in real-time, have sub-conversations (privately), ability to add editing of documents, etc in real time, and other nifty plugins… not to mention Google’s spectacular translate on the fly tech demo…
Plus you can implement your own wave interface using the API…
PS: The threaded conversations don’t just look “similar” to Facebook, they look exactly like Facebook
All sign up with YAMMER to Promote Fast, Easy Booking for Vacation Rentals from Lake Tahoe to the Caribbean…
Looking for followers come Join Us!
Thank you,
Scott
A lot of enterprise microblogging services like Yammer, Socialcast face the issue of adoption given that they have separate workflows for most businesses. Most businesses are using email for messaging or Google Docs type of collaboration tool.
That is why we created Socialwok, enterprise feed sharing that is integrated with your Google Apps workflow. If you use Google Apps, Socialwok is the natural choice http://socialwok.com
You use your google apps account to login and do not have to use any other email addresses or remember extra passwds that services like require you to do.