Call me old school, but I’ve had a hard time warming up to Twitter. I certainly see the business/networking/marketing value in the service (there are lots of posts like this one confirming that value) and I will continue to use the search functionality to eavesdrop on conversations about Alice, and other items that interest me. I’ve even tried to follow some of the companies that are leading the charge on Twitter like Zappos (a company I love, by the way). But do I really want to get tweets from the CEO of Zappos like this one:
Vegas cab lines highly inefficient. 15 cabs ready, but hotel staff calls them 1×1, ask destination for tip. I repeat destination inside cab.
Not so much.
I do, however, really like Yammer, a Twitter-like service for the workplace that recently won the TechCrunch 50 award. It is easy to use, and more importantly, it is private to the company, which allows us to yammer about confidential work stuff and not worry about who will read it. It has also allowed us to keep our e-mail much cleaner, since we can microblog on Yammer to the entire group without clogging up everyones’ e-mail box. Here is an example from Alice this morning:
Stephen Baker over at BusinessWeek recently tried Yammer and mentioned a concern for companies with big org charts. Namely, that Yammer might get really unruly and allow your boss to spy on you, but it is perfect for a start-up like Alice. We are up to 11 employees now and spread out over a pretty big space. Yammer makes me feel like all 11 of us are sitting around a conference room table, where anyone can chat up the entire group just by speaking up. This may change as we get bigger, but so far I think it has added to our culture.
By the way, you can follow me on Twitter here if you want to. I promise not to tweet when I’m waiting in a cab 
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Ah Twitter. I love to follow Twitter, but I’m useless at remembering to do it myself.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
It took me ages to even understand twitter. Someone gave me the advice of just using it to figure it out. They were correct and now I am using it to announce new blog posts. But I try to keep the mundane facts about my life to a minimum. I keep those for my blog posts. I found your blog through Alice which I learned about through Business Opportunities Weblog. It is very inspiring.