Not long ago an interesting phenomenon was sweeping Silicon Valley: the yet another social network (YASN) phenomenon. There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the Valley: the yet another messaging service (YASM) phenomenon. As soon as one popular service launches a whole slew of copycats typically follow. Some of these businesses obtain funding and at least one of them ends up getting acquired typically.
Yesterday all of the buzz was about one of these new messaging services: Yammer. It ended up receiving the award of winner of Techcrunch 50. A pretty user interface and a great presentation was all it took to impress the judges. Honestly, Techcrunch did themselves a disservice by awarding this company best in show. It’s essentially a Twitter for the enterprise.
Mark Evans cries “Don’t Hammer Yammer!” and goes on to explain that “it’s easy to use and could be an effective communications tool if employees need and want a Twitter-like instant messaging tool.” Hold on there Mark, I have a great new messaging system for your employees, it’s called e-mail. I have digital messages practically coming out of my ears at this point.
From instant messages to emails to direct messages on Twitter to messages on Facebook, it’s unmanageable. Now Yammer things that they have the great idea of throwing another messaging service my way. Their solution for cleaning out my inbox? Go use another messaging service! Are they serious? The key to efficiency is not building more nonsensical systems and pile them on top of inefficient systems.
You still have an inefficient system at the core (email). So if you are going to sing praise of Yammer, keep it out of the comments. Every comment on my blogs ends up as an email and the last message I need to be replying to at this point is one about Yammer.
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To be honest, though, I was pretty underwhelmed with the majority (but not all) of the TC50 offerings, as most seemed to be more like a single element of a larger product.
There were one or two standout (and stand-alone) products that excited me, but overall I was quite disappointed. Heyho, I guess it was different if you were there and got to see the demos and no doubt some will grow into "real" products (eg Xobni).
(Sorry, went a bit OT there!)
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E-mail is a great digital messaging tool but in many cases a short instant-message could be better than clogging up someone's in-box.
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