chrisbrogan.com - Latest Comments in Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

chris — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:15:53 -0000

i think you're wrong. I'm trying to get my government agency involved in an internal social network, and they don't want employees to be able to access other social media sites.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

brianbeirne — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:07:25 -0000

You could also try the service Present.ly. Similar to the rest but completely behind the firewall. Also, it's used by some big names in the IT industry.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Daneel — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:48:46 -0000

What about AlertThingy integration with Yammer? Doesn't this have the same effect as Twirl with Laconica?

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Travis James — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:50:38 -0000

I have been trying to get people in my company (consulting engineering firm) to use Yammer for the past month. I will tell you there is no way I could sell this idea to my company unless it was simple to get everyone up on it. I am not an IT guy, I am an engineer so I needed a solution that I could introduce and then continue on my other responsibilities. I am not really sure what sort of IT responsibility there is for the Twhirl Laconi.ca partnership, but it would have to be easy to install and manage. Finally, as far as I can tell (I haven’t been using Twhirl for very long) Twhirl doesn’t have a group function. Would this capability be made possible by Laconi.ca? In my opinion the gathering of related information in the same place is mandatory. Yammer has been meeting my expectations and I hope they continue. If you have suggestions for me on how to better understand Laconi.ca, I would appreciate them. –ptrav37

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Carl — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:44:05 -0000

I like Yammer actually...
http://www.carlknibbs.net/b...

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Daniel — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:25:13 -0000

"Behind firewall" is actually a problem for the business side in big companies. Therefore Yammer is a perfect solution. You don't have to bother the CIO (and you know it's impossible to do that if you are an "simple" end user). You can reach it whereever you are. You can handle fairly internal stuff there.
It's a business solution, like many new services in the cloud.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Ravi — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:45:26 -0000

We are using Yammer for the last few days as an experiment. The uptake within the organization has been rapid. It seems to have great potential for quick knowledge distribution esp. where one needs a sentence/statement and a link. Not so good for a detailed discussion on a specific topic where one has a lot to put across (like forums or like the discussion here on this blog). Secondly isolating by groups is needed i.e. not all tweets are relevant to all. Tagging helps but that needs to be imposed i.e. use standard tags only else can very well get out of control. A lot of companies would not really go through the pain of installing laconi.ca and twhirl across the organization imho atleast the non-tech ones at this point in time. Maybe in the near future these systems would be routine.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Mark Bockenstedt — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:11:58 -0000

Having used both Yammer and Laconi.ca, it's hard to choose just one solution and recommend it for an enterprise. I can definitely see the advantages of both. Keep in mind that many companies already have their own XMPP servers in place and setting up the email routing would be pretty simple. Getting a Laconi.ca instance going isn't exactly pleasant, but it's liveable. Like others have said, Laconi.ca lives on the company network instead of outside of it, which gives them greater control over the system AND the content.

Twhirl's integration with Laconi.ca makes it a more attractive combination, since Twhirl itself is one of the leading third-party clients for Twitter.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Jesse Luna — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:18:49 -0000

When I first saw the TechCrunch50 presentation by Yammer all I could think of was "knowledge management made easy."

Sure we're talking about micro-blogging, inter company communication, and the Web 2.0 world, but finding a knowledge management system that is easy to install/use, maintain, and understand is a breakthrough.

Companies will decide based on their company needs and resources. If they have the developer power then they may choose to go with the custom Identi.ca but if they are resource short, then Yammer makes more sense.

Either way, companies now have a couple of exciting, intuitive, and very low cost ways to implement a knowledge management system.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Wedge — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:39:13 -0000

When I saw Yammer, I was disappointed it won (it's not innovative) and I wanted it for the company I work for. Now I'm glad to learn that a self-hosted solution exists without having to get into Yammer. It might take me a year to convince management that internal microblogging can add value to dislocated teams though!

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Ricardo Sueiras — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:46:31 -0000

Yammer is a much more engaging prospect for the enterprise. In the three days we have had it virally enabled within our (very large) enterprise we have had much more active participation than the equiv. Twitter + pick your choice of tools&clients. And we have tried to engage people in Twitter for some time, but have had very poor takeup.

In a nutshell that is why IMHO, I think Yammer does stand a chance - it does one thing, but it does it very well.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Robin Majumdar — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:50:55 -0000

The "inside the firewall" component of the solution is what is key. Trust me, few enterprises are willing to relinquish control (at least total control) of enterprise apps, be it collaboration, document management, IM et al. to a pure cloud computing solution managed entirely by a private firm.

This is where your twhirl option becomes very interesting. Naturally, any enterprise systems admin will have to analyse this for due diligence issues surround IP ownership, not to mention enterprise IT compliance issues...

That being said, I find your post great for revealing this most interesting enterprise twitter option.

Rob

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

L Martin Johnson Pratt — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:40:08 -0000

I am sorry i wasnt saying Digsby value is IM Digsby value in in the ability to login into all my twitter accounts ALL AT ONCE i have 12 accounts and all my email accounts at once.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Michael Bleigh — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:29:18 -0000

I think ultimately the idea is giving companies more options. We're launching Present.ly in this same space next week, and with it the option for enterprises to install a private Present.ly instance inside the firewall.

Laconi.ca may well be the best solution for some companies, while a hosted solution like Present.ly or Yammer may work for others. For one thing, it will certainly be less expensive to use a hosted solution than to dedicate a server or multiple servers to an internally hosted service. It's all about matching the feature set, security concerns, and general feel of the solution to the problem.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

ResPres — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:33:38 -0000

I keep coming back to this. I love Twhirl and we've been using Yammer inside our company with great success since launch. I know Yammer is trying to get Twhirl to work with them, and I'd welcome that. But I have Twhirl up right beside my Yammer AIR app and I'm not sure I see the difference (beside firewall issues) between that and having two Twhirl tabs. Having FF and Twitter open in Twhirl looks, except for color, just like having Yammer and Twhirl open at the same time.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Kevin Mullins — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:19:47 -0000

Great post and great comments. I agree with Jesse that Twhirl and Laconica is the best solution. You can keep Laconica behind the firewall if that suits you or have two Laconica installations, on in front of the firewall and one behind the firewall, and use the twhirl client to feed both.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

chrisbrogan — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 06:51:25 -0000

IM is not Twitter and never will be for a few reasons.

Group IM is one to many, but doesn't leave the archive live and visual. (At least in most instances).

Yammer's big feature is administration. Last thing I'd want is to be the poor schmoo who's tasked with being the Yammer administrator. I get that it's good to be able to nab "Well, you're a poopyhead!" posts off the archive, but oy.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

L Martin Johnson Pratt — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:50:08 -0000

Actually DIGSBY solves all of that i am using it to login into 12 different twitter accounts, 12 different gmail accounts, 12 different yahoo accounts, 1 facebook account and 12 different myspace accounts and it has not crashed once yet. You can setup it to connect to friendfeed also it has im for all of the IM clients yahoo, aim, icq all of this is free in 1 single place on your taskbar!! - http://www.digsby.com

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Jesse Stay — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:16:22 -0000

@damon I think you're right - that would be a great feature for Laconi.ca to support though. Great thing to think about for the Laconi.ca future IMO.

However, as long as Twitter is around, and the option is between a hosted service and something like Laconi.ca, were I to choose a hosted service, I don't see why not just let the employees use the network they're already using and building connections on. For any other communication, there's always e-mail or IM - I don't get why a corporation would need microblogging for internal communication between employees. At least not a reason for a hosted solution that could only resolve a very small number of problems in the enterprise.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon Cortesi — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:12:58 -0000

@Jesse - Don't you need to provide a profile url to follow somebody on a remote laconi.ca instance? That would prove difficult if the internal instance did not have an Internet-accessible address/URL. Not to mention I'd imagine those same CEO's would cringe if an external instance could receive updates from an internal instance.

Yammer's business model _is_ actually providing administrators control over the service. They can manage users of the network as well as restrict access by IP address. If Yammer wants to be considered by any reasonably-sized enterprise, however, they will likely need to put some sort of SLA in place as well as assurances regarding data privacy and security. Whether they have the potential to do so, that's unknown. I suspect they have some sort of sharding behind the scenes based on email address and if Big Org X wanted the service on their own subset of servers, it would likely be possible. Hosted services are not uncommon in an organization - just look at the success of outsourced IT services.

In the end, yes, Yammer is a hosted service and when it comes to a company concerned about privacy and security, would need to go with laconi.ca if they wanted "micro-blogging". That being said, there are several other enterprise solutions available for instant-messaging in the enterprise, but none with the public stream/micro-blogging concept.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Jesse Stay — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:55:46 -0000

Actually, Laconi.ca is more the winner here, and they beat Yammer a long time ago. Any Laconi.ca instance can not only work inside your firewall, but it can also work with other Laconi.ca instances outside the firewall. So, you could essentially have an account on the much larger Identi.ca service to communicate with the world, and your internal Laconi.ca instance could subscribe to people on the Identi.ca instance and import them into the firewall.

I'm willing to bet that near 50% of the 150 or so CIOs of large corporations I talked to on Wednesday in Dallas would cringe at the thought of letting employees use Yammer because they have no control within their firewall over the service. I suggested Laconi.ca, which is a true solution large corporations can actually consider. I still can't believe Yammer won TC50 - I'm in shock.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

ResPres — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:05:15 -0000

If Loic is smart, and he is, he will use the Yammer API and integrate it int Twhirl as well.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

chrisbrogan — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:38:38 -0000

@Ari - SMS is kind of the killer add-in to these new microblogging clones. It SHOULD show up in all these platforms, and if nothing else, it should be a bolt-on.

But corporations can do without the SMS for a while. They like the little one-to-many knowledge base feeling. The SMS is a nice-to-have. That is, until they try it and love it.

Even a mobile web app add-on could make them forget about it for a while.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon Cortesi — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:21:05 -0000

@Ari Yammer does use SMS and even has a shortcode. This is one of the things that keeps me off laconi.ca and frustrates me about Twitter. Yammer lets you send notifications to email/jabber/sms, similar to how Twitter did and previously allowed me to manage the noise on Twitter a little better.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Ari Herzog — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:15:46 -0000

How come nobody is mentioning SMS?

One of the functions of Twitter that makes it popular is people can SMS messages from BlackBerry and other applications.

Yammer is hosted behind a firewall and doesn't use SMS, so what's the difference between Yammer and any generic instant messaging program? Even Microsoft has a built-in talk program at the DOS level.