I heard a nice little piece on one of the radio shows today (can't remember which one) on Yammer - which TechCrunch recently described as "Twitter with a business model."

Yammer takes Twitter-style micorblogging and adapts it to internal business communications. Let's say you need to know who's working on the Kladly-Playstein Account Report. You could email 15 or 20 people and wait/hope for responses - but that involves deciding who to email (and, depending on your corporate cultural environment, deciding what order to email them in). If everyone in the office (or building) is on Yammer, you simply post the question with there. It goes to everyone, and to no one in particular. People reply back in short little bursts. And everyone's inbox in the building ends up being reserved for things that really need one-on-one communications.

Yammer won the prize from TechCrunch for top startup back in September. The advantage of Yammer over Twitter is that Yammer is a closed system within your corporate intranet. No one outside the company can ready what you Yammer about...


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Dmitriy Shironosov