Friday TechTips

After a pause I again have a collection of tools and services to bring to you each Friday afternoon. Today we’re going to look at a new service which just so happened to win best new app at the TechCrunch 50 conference held earlier this month. The announcement was forwarded to me by a library colleague. I’m sure most of you have heard of twitter, a sort of microblogging, public IM, life broadcasting service where you’re free to say anything you want as long as it’s one hundred and forty characters or less. Today’s tip is very much like Twitter, you might even say a “Twitter clone” (a term being used frequently these days). What I’m talking about is: Yammer!

Yammer provides the same functionality as Twitter BUT it’s geared toward the workplace. In fact it’s even restricted to your email domain, which means that only people with richmond.edu addresses are able to sign up for our shared space. Your posts can’t be viewed outside of the richmond.edu environment unless you purposely broadcast the RSS feed of your submissions. A number of people have already signed up under our domain, so I encourage you to do the same. How might this be useful? Here are a few ideas: keep others or your team up to date on projects or things you’re working on, a change in meeting locations, quick exchanges to help prevent email inbox overload, etc. Like Twitter, Yammer is a flexible platform that allows you use it as you see fit.

After creating an account, it might be a good idea to look at the other members and “follow” everyone whose update you’d like to receive in your account. There are also multiple ways to access Yammer: the web site, downloadable clients for Windows and Mac, and iPhone and BlackBerry apps. You can also send and receive updates via SMS.

Site - http://www.yammer.com

TechCrunch50 Site - http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference

Yammer Video Tour - http://www.yammer.com/company/tour

Give it a try as I’m eager to see what ideas people come up with on how to best utilize it!