Although not related to what I usually blog about, I couldn't help myself: Yammer seems to work in scenarios where Twitter doesn't - at work. I know it seems obvious, not least because that is why they were each made the way they were, by the people who made them. But it took a trial and error process to (re)discover the obvious.

Let me explain. I work in a biomedical research environment, where people move around alot during their work day and can't always be found in one spot or by telephone.  I have been searching for a way to communicate with a small group of co-workers (about a dozen or so) largely for stuff with a short half-life: to see where they are (saves me from running around our lab floor looking for them in any one of various locations); ask what the results of an experiment are (once I have asked, it's off my mind to ask them!); to quickly share an announcement (good seminar this afternoon) etc. I don't want to use email and its not a blog kind of thing, and SMS is too restrictive.

So when I became aware of Twitter I started using it, and still do - I love reading about what some people are doing (try Stephen Fry's Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/stephenfry), for example), and occasionally use it myself to say hello to the world. However when I tried to bring it in for the purpose mentioned above it didn't work very well. Although I am not sure why, I had some ideas - see also here: Twitter Goes Mainstream by Jessica Vascellaro in the WSJ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122461906719455335.html) on those - now I think it is because of the open and free-wheelin' culture of Twitter. It is just out there - you are speaking to anyone who cares to listen. The reason I believe that, is because when I tried Yammer recently, it caught on immediately.

Yammer is like Twitter, but associated with your employer. Not only that, it is a breeze to create a private group within that environment, which I promptly did for my lab, and lo and behold, people are taking to it with only minimal prompting. The key difference may be that it has clearly defined walls, which gives users some comfort and, yes, a feeling of intimacy in the sense of being among colleagues as in a meeting. You know who is listening, so to speak.The other hurdles I saw for Twitter - its on your computer where my co-workers are not for much of the day, you need to run separate software etc also apply here. That is why I think the difference may be how people feel about the technology. Sometimes the human factors is easy to forget...