Yammer, a Twitter Clone, Wins Top Prize at TechCrunch 50
Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”
Yammer is basically Twitter for businesses. Unlike Twitter, is is tailored for the enterprise market, offering desktop, iPhone, and Blackberry apps, IM support, email support, and SMS. And, unlike Twitter, it appears to have a viable monetization model.
In an effort to keep it clean, Yammer only works for corporate email addresses. While it’s obvious to say that Twitter should have done something like this, they it may not be as easy to pull off as it seems. The security issues and needs to larger companies, especially those where privacy is a primary and grave concern, would require some hard work, and Twitter has had enough scaling problems to deal with to keep them pretty busy. Yammer is on the ground floor with enterprise concerns in mind.
The business model for Yammer is simple: businesses that want administrative tools, set passwords, and allow for usable IP ranges, they will pay Yammer a fee and set this up. While the security features appear to be better than with Twitter, it is still hosted on a remote site and may have problems if an open source alternative pops up that allows companies to install a microblogging program on their own servers. But with Google docs, Gmail, and Basecamp all finding a good amount of success, there’s no reason to believe a lot of companies who already use these tools will shy away from Yammer. It may not be for Northrop Grumman, but it wouldn’t be bad for a heck of a lot of other enterprises already working in the cloud.
The long-term feasibility may come down to how hard it is to clone microblogging services, if Twitter comes up with something, and if an open source solution arises that companies implement themselves. But for now, it fills a big niche, and certainly is getting a lot of interest. It shows the success that can come about when you arrive prepared. They had apps up, the site fully functional, and a feasible business model when they arrived, and it won them $50,000 of TechCrunch’s money.
One thing is for sure: it will be interesting to see what Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone of Twitter have to say about this. One thing is for sure: none of them have publicly Tweeted on it.
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