Yammer Tops TechCrunch50

I was not surprised to hear that Yammer won the top prize at TechCrunch50. I singled them out in my Twittering at the conference as one of the companies with a clear business proposition.

Obliquely, this is also confirmation of the basic concept of work streaming that I have been advocating for a long long time, and is the basis of Workstreamer. The idea that work activities — like request for meetings, status changes in tasks, peoples comings and goings, and new information about projects — should flow to you rather than sitting in web pages, documents, or emails is compelling.

Yammer is a more-or-less point for point duplication of Twitter functionality, which makes it so odd that Twitter has refused to build this product. That is spectacularly dumb. Here’s what it looks like.

Yammer : Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

They have appropriated the GetSatisfaction model of coercing companies to take control of their created profiles. Anyone with a corporate email account (like joesschmutz@bigcompany.com domain) can create a company Yammer. Obviously, once a lot of employees are using it, the company in incented to ‘claim’ the network that has been created, for the fee of $1/mo for each member of the network, and leading to these additional benefits:

Claim, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I haven’t downloaded the various clients — desktop and blackberry — but that’s really smart, as is mobile support. I couldn’t get IM interaction to work (their bot thinks I am stoweboyd@aim.jabber.yammer.com) but I bet it does in general. This strategy of becoming the central hub of work conversation, and pashing and pulling to just about any device a user has, is super killer.

I think I will create some email addresses for all the contributors on my various blogs, and invite them in, so we can use Yammer among ourselves.