Yammer ups bet on the “Twitter for business” market

January 19, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

This could be the year that micro-messaging makes it big with businesses, Yammer is betting. The company lets employees share 140-character messages about what they’re working on — a simple intranet to help communicate more quickly than through masses of emails and phone calls. It has raised $5 million from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, founder David Sacks tells TechCrunch.

I’d be interested to hear specific ways that Yammer saves companies time and money — the usual requirement of business software. Lower phone bills? Less time reading email? It’s not clear what sort of traction Yammer has gotten since it launched and took home the grand prize at the TechCrunch50 startup conference in August. Anecdotally, we’ve heard good reports.

Certainly, the growth of consumer-facing Twitter this past year — estimated in the millions — suggests that the concept of micro-messaging is going mainstream. But for business? West Hollywood, Calif-based Yammer, through the TC50 win, seems to have branded itself as the go-to “Twitter for business” app. To sign up, somebody in a company creates an account using their work address (johnsmith@acme.com), then invites colleagues at the company who use the the same workplace email domain (billybob@acme.com, susiesue@acme.com). Yammer’s idea is to have employees invite each other and so grow virally within a company, similar to what Facebook did on college campuses by having people log in using their student@college.edu email accounts. It also offers an Blackberry app, a way to organize users by workgroup and other features designed specifically for business users.

Eventually, Yammer hopes companies will be so addicted to the service that they’ll pay a $1 per month per user fee for premium services, like special administrative features, security and data ownership. If that starts happening, it could have a business model making money before Twitter itself does.

There are many variations of Twitter also coming out. Certainly, what Yammer has built could be duplicated by Twitter itself — there are already other startups building micro-messaging services for businesses. One is Identi.ca, a small startup that recently raised an angel round. It hopes to let users create their own Twitter-like systems and offers open source software to let them do so. That’s the thing, though. A simple micro-messaging service isn’t hard to create, but it’s hard to operate at scale. And it can be difficult to get the branding and all the little features right and to differentiate oneself from the pack. Yammer appears to be doing so.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Phil
    its called "microblogging"
  • To you it is.
  • Phil
    and about 20 million other people.
  • If they provide a down loadable version that can be setup in an intranet like presently I can see a business. Medium to Large enterprises will never allow their employees to publish what they are working on the web. Here is what I got when I tried to launch Yammer from work:

    .......................... You have been re-directed to this page because you have attempted to access a site which is not approved by XXX.

    Please note the following requirements concerning use of XXX networks and sending of XXX-related communications ..........................

    Why go elsewhere, would you honestly sign in to yammer and post what you are working on and not be worried about leaking the hottest news you are about to cover?
  • pgkiran, that's what identi.ca (and i'm sure others) are working on.
  • Intel is experimenting with laconi.ca (the open-source project behind identi.ca) for internal micro-blogging
  • I know many companies have their own propietary version of this... it would be useful indeed.. but here's what I think:

    1) Forget about having users invite other users in the same company. Go out there and pitch this to big companies and sell it to them. And as pg said, it must be private as well. Start with talking to startup founders and expand from there. People do want this.

    2) A tool like this saves time.. and money because it's like a virtual conference call with updates happening live in your screen... It's perfect for finding out issues with connecting to a production database, or a server issue plaguing everyone.. ppl could put in updates as they see it.. one person could say 'oh.. this is working right now', another could say 'oh snap, I notice this isn't working'. You could check in minutes later to check what the update is... instead of calling tech support or the database administrator.. plus sometimes in a big company, someone else u didn't know could've gave you the answer you wanted.

    But once again, you must try to sell this to companies, and not expect it to grow virally.