Rise of the Twitter Clones

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Yammer. Winners of the TechCrunch 50 prize, Yammer (and others) are reinventing microblogging as an enterprise communication tool.

Is the enterprise ready for the social networking revolution? Sure, services such as LinkedIn have been targeting the corporate demographic for a while, but these services mainly involve networking outside company walls. Yammer is pitching the usefulness of social networking inside a company or an organization.

The networking aspect of the application allows Yammer to get a foot in the door through grassroots initiative. Anyone can open an account for free. This gives enthusiastic and tech-savvy employees a chance to make the pitch to their coworkers. Once the value has been proven, companies may elect to pay for additional features, including the ability to limit access to a range of IP addresses, or a company VPN.

Several of us at Arc90 are already appreciating the benefits of the Yammer service. While the wide world of Twitter may not particularly care that you are in a meeting until 12:30, your coworkers might find that information tremendously useful.

Of course, we’re not the sort of people who leave well enough alone, so we’ve already started thinking of ways to integrate Yammer with our own internal tools and services. Fortunately, Yammer has launched an API precisely for this purpose. We’ll be keeping an eye on the API as it evolves (it’s currently listed as a beta service), but we’re happy to announce the release of a PHP API Client library over on the lab.