After the selection of Yammer (Corporate Twitter) at TechCrunch 50 (see
our take here) it was very tempting to suggest that for any ambitious startup, the obvious thing is to copy something that works in the consumer space and give it an Enterprise patina. Duncan Riley has
got there already though:
Friender (Corporate FriendFeed)
FriendFeed for people who share a corporate email address. The service allows you to share links from the corporate intranet, and has a built in censorship tool for naughty words, such as innovation and original.
Blogoporate (Blogger for corporates)
What better way to practice astroturfing and spam than on your own corporate blog network. Blogoporate comes with support for Blogoporate Friend Connect, so you’ll never feel alone in your startup office of 5.
Fitbitmer (corporate Fitbit)
Big brother becomes a reality as this new whizbang dongle tracks your working day. Slacking off on the job, taking 2 minutes extra for lunch? Now corporate overlords can save millions through docking pay and on the spot firings
Seesmicer (corporate Seesmic)
What office isn’t complete without a daily message from the CEO, followed by 150 videos of corporate grovelling. The perfect communications tool for the 21st century.
As a number of people have noted, Corporate social software interest is often more about it watching you than the other way round, so Fitbitmer has that worrying ring of truth in jest to it.
Its probably not that easy to get corporates to buy these technologies, however - to integrate something like Yammer is non trivial - I suspect it will be bought by a supplier first to be integrated (assuming they don't decide to DiY of course, or adapt IM or similar).
Update - interesting piece by Businessweek on their
experience of using Yammer - here's the rub:
Here’s the other problem. We work in a big company with an org chart. Most of us scribes don’t want the editors who evaluate our work (and pay us) to read our back-and-forths. But, at the same time, we don’t want to put a big Keep Out sign our Yammer box. (They might take that badly.) So while I imaging that this tool works perfectly for a start-up team, it could be problematic for more established companies.
Whoops. As I type this, I see that Peter Elstrom, an assistant managing editor, is now following me on Yammer. Will that change my behavior? Anyone’s guess.
Quite - Twitter is designed a round a social network of equals (or at lesat worshippers of teh same deities), not a business heirarchy. Totally different dynamic if its used the same way in a business sense.
