Social Communications

Twitter is obviously one of the big online success stories of the past couple of years. Driving to work I’ve even heard Radio 4 talking about it, and various BBC 5 live ‘phone ins’ now actively ask people to tweet them messages. Seems like it’s becoming a recognised channel of communication.

About a year ago enterprise versions of twitter started cropping up, most notably Yammer. These are a great idea in principle because they offer a company all the advantages of twitter but also provide the nice cuddley blanket which is a feeling of control over the environment.

The big problem with these offerings of course is that hardly anyone used them. If you ‘got’ twitter (and are therefore a target audience of Yammer etc) then you have a twitter account and you don’t really want to have to go elsewhere to re-enter your 140 character aphorisms. If you don’t ‘get’ twitter then you are unlikely to be interested in Yammer either.

Back in the dim and distant past I set up the open.ac.uk yammer account. As suggested above some of those OU folk who get twitter created an account and then never used it! no-one who didn’t get twitter created an account (tho admittedly i think i only told people about it via twitter )

Anyway, today (or yesterday perhaps – I have no idea what the date is) Yammer announced Twitter integration by using the #yam tag. I’ve given it a quick test and it works perfectly. Whether it’s enough to reach the tipping point I don’t know, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction!

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