LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and now Yammer? How many Adobe Air desktop clients can I have running at once? TweetDeck does Twitter and Facebook, but not Yammer (yet). How many live streams should I keep up with? Once you start on a social network can you stop? Why can’t everyone just agree on one for personal and one for business use?
I find Twitter a good business tool, a helpful way to keep up with trends, and communicate with people — and as laid out in this ComputerWorld article there are other benefits too, such as that it is not creepy to follow people you don’t know. I just stumbled into Yammer in the last couple of days. And at our workplace it seems I’m not the only one. There were 129 people from our company when I signed up. One day later is was 143. Now, less than a week later we’re over 150. And there is some pretty rich conversation going on. Oddly, while Yammer itself has a lot in common with Twitter, the nature of the conversation here is much more direct, person-to-person. It feels to me like some middle ground between Facebook update, twitter, and old-school IM. So I’m happy to be number 130, and see some real value in the service. But allow me to groan a little — another social network to monitor? There is value in each one I follow — I just need one desktop app to monitor (or rule) them all. TweetDeck, are you listening? Maybe Mozilla’s new Raindrop will help? But I think I’ve reached my social-network-membership limit — at least until the NEW greatest thing rolls along!
Mozilla recently announced its latest project, “Raindrop”, an application intended to bring all of your online messages to one portal. That includes Email, tweets, RSS, and social network updates all in one place. Raindrop will be open source and based on Bespin.
Yammer: A ‘Twitter for the enterprise’ | Webware – CNET
Here at TechCrunch50, the idea is also in evidence with Yammer, more of a “Twitter for business” than Socialcast, since it doesn’t seem to be able to pull in external feeds the same way. However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use “hashtags” for tagging topics, and they can follow just those tags. Useful if you want to follow a project, but not necessarily all the people working on it.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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