Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

September 12, 2008 · Comments

twhirl Reading this news that Loic LeMeur sent me this morning, I see that Twhirl, the social software front end client, now supports any laconi.ca install. If you’re not yet up on laconi.ca , it’s an open source, run it on your own servers version of Twitter. See the flagship install of it at identi.ca.

So, to sum that all up: Twitter inside the firewall, private for your business is Twhirl+laconi.ca. Twitter outside the firewall with your business colleagues and friends is Twhirl+Twitter. Easy cheesy. One app.

Recently announced at TechCrunch50, Yammer is angling to be the Twitter for the enterprise client. Believe me, lots of companies have asked for this very thing. And while I don’t want to take away from the technical qualities of why Yammer is cool, and why it might well do the trick just fine for businesses, I’m thinking that what Loic LeMeur and the Twhirl team just did kind of trumps Yammer. Why?

Single client.

Logged into my Twhirl account, I can have a tab for Twitter, a tab for FriendFeed, and a tab for my laconi.ca install of choice. That means I can have a behind-the-firewall and a lets-share-with-everyone install all in one client.

This is pretty darned clever, Loic.

I’m digging into it further now, but I think I’ve just found a great recommendation for a dual-use Twitter-like environment thanks to this bridging strategy by Twhirl.

What do you think? Am I wrong?

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  • You nailed it Chris. You are right.

    I can't believe that twitter won't respond by offering http://yourcompanyname.twitter.com and associated services ,nor can I believe that from all of the startups at TC50, this secondhand daylight should shine through as the best web startup the Valley has to offer.

    Internal IM? Having to follow your boss but being unable to follow customers or the outside world? WTF?
  • The primary difference is that Yammer is a hosted service. Is an enterprise really going to want to install the number of laconi.ca instances required to maintain a reasonable environment? Not only that, but laconi.ca is still in the early stages and under heavy development and likely to change (read: require heavy work on the admin side).

    From the point of an organization, what would you want to do?
    Install Apache/Laconi.ca/Jabber and maintain all those systems required?

    or signup for Yammer.

    While I appreciate the goals behind laconi.ca and (personally) would much prefer an independent solution for behind-the-firewall conversations (trade secrets, intellectual property, etc), I don't feel that laconi.ca is quite at that point yet where it can reliably support the needs of an enterprise without a lot of love and care on the admin side.
  • Twitter would need to expand the feature set a bit, but could do so in a couple of months. I am sure glad that I am not chasing the Yammer dream. Twitter can just wait a bit and learn what the Enterprise wants. Then they can implement it and infiltrate into the enterprise through their existing user base.
  • @damon - they would if they're not so interested in having private conversations leave the firewall, n'est pas?
  • @chris - Fair enough, though it would have to be a company comfortable with adopting brand new technology that's likely to change on a much more regular basis than typical enterprise software - decision for the business at that point. If putting in place and concerned about private conversations, I would also want to see a little more attention to security. (And neither Yammer or Laconi.ca are exempt here, as I have found security issues with both.)
  • I did a quick blurb about Yammer on our blog (CGBlog.org) and its possible uses in the Coast Guard (or any government agency) for at the time I didn't think a stand alone client existed (though I admint I knew of laconi.ca setup but it didn't register). No sooner than I posted it the folks from Present.ly contact me saying they were better. Long story short, nether of these are all that good considering laconi.ca internal install is open-source (i.e. free!). Something to think about.
  • sweet post - looked at Yammer the other day and was a little underwhelmed, especially considering what was going on in other arenas (like @DAHOWLETT's ESME posts)

    I know more than a few companies that are still blocking IM, not because they dont believe in it, but because they cant organize around that kind of workflow (and sarbanes oxley and others)

    Micromessaging will have a bigger and bigger place, but the inertia aint coming from the big boys (unless a division or small teams are using it - asynchronous baby!)

    I always thought loic grabbed Twirhl because there was going to be a video component to it (microvideomessaging)... I dont think the second act has started yet
  • What's the difference between "corporate Twitter" in whatever software implementation and IM (with a group) at work? Am I missing something?
  • The challenge is with large corporations that will likely NOT adopt either Yammer or this combo, the employees can still benefit greatly from the use of Yammer but have no shot at the other solution.

    That is what will drive users to Yammer, but no revenue (until they of course end up throwing ads into the ones where the company hasn't taken over).
  • How come nobody is mentioning SMS?

    One of the functions of Twitter that makes it popular is people can SMS messages from BlackBerry and other applications.

    Yammer is hosted behind a firewall and doesn't use SMS, so what's the difference between Yammer and any generic instant messaging program? Even Microsoft has a built-in talk program at the DOS level.
  • @Ari Yammer does use SMS and even has a shortcode. This is one of the things that keeps me off laconi.ca and frustrates me about Twitter. Yammer lets you send notifications to email/jabber/sms, similar to how Twitter did and previously allowed me to manage the noise on Twitter a little better.
  • @Ari - SMS is kind of the killer add-in to these new microblogging clones. It SHOULD show up in all these platforms, and if nothing else, it should be a bolt-on.

    But corporations can do without the SMS for a while. They like the little one-to-many knowledge base feeling. The SMS is a nice-to-have. That is, until they try it and love it.

    Even a mobile web app add-on could make them forget about it for a while.
  • If Loic is smart, and he is, he will use the Yammer API and integrate it int Twhirl as well.
  • Actually, Laconi.ca is more the winner here, and they beat Yammer a long time ago. Any Laconi.ca instance can not only work inside your firewall, but it can also work with other Laconi.ca instances outside the firewall. So, you could essentially have an account on the much larger Identi.ca service to communicate with the world, and your internal Laconi.ca instance could subscribe to people on the Identi.ca instance and import them into the firewall.

    I'm willing to bet that near 50% of the 150 or so CIOs of large corporations I talked to on Wednesday in Dallas would cringe at the thought of letting employees use Yammer because they have no control within their firewall over the service. I suggested Laconi.ca, which is a true solution large corporations can actually consider. I still can't believe Yammer won TC50 - I'm in shock.
  • @Jesse - Don't you need to provide a profile url to follow somebody on a remote laconi.ca instance? That would prove difficult if the internal instance did not have an Internet-accessible address/URL. Not to mention I'd imagine those same CEO's would cringe if an external instance could receive updates from an internal instance.

    Yammer's business model _is_ actually providing administrators control over the service. They can manage users of the network as well as restrict access by IP address. If Yammer wants to be considered by any reasonably-sized enterprise, however, they will likely need to put some sort of SLA in place as well as assurances regarding data privacy and security. Whether they have the potential to do so, that's unknown. I suspect they have some sort of sharding behind the scenes based on email address and if Big Org X wanted the service on their own subset of servers, it would likely be possible. Hosted services are not uncommon in an organization - just look at the success of outsourced IT services.

    In the end, yes, Yammer is a hosted service and when it comes to a company concerned about privacy and security, would need to go with laconi.ca if they wanted "micro-blogging". That being said, there are several other enterprise solutions available for instant-messaging in the enterprise, but none with the public stream/micro-blogging concept.
  • @damon I think you're right - that would be a great feature for Laconi.ca to support though. Great thing to think about for the Laconi.ca future IMO.

    However, as long as Twitter is around, and the option is between a hosted service and something like Laconi.ca, were I to choose a hosted service, I don't see why not just let the employees use the network they're already using and building connections on. For any other communication, there's always e-mail or IM - I don't get why a corporation would need microblogging for internal communication between employees. At least not a reason for a hosted solution that could only resolve a very small number of problems in the enterprise.
  • Actually DIGSBY solves all of that i am using it to login into 12 different twitter accounts, 12 different gmail accounts, 12 different yahoo accounts, 1 facebook account and 12 different myspace accounts and it has not crashed once yet. You can setup it to connect to friendfeed also it has im for all of the IM clients yahoo, aim, icq all of this is free in 1 single place on your taskbar!! - http://www.digsby.com
  • IM is not Twitter and never will be for a few reasons.

    Group IM is one to many, but doesn't leave the archive live and visual. (At least in most instances).

    Yammer's big feature is administration. Last thing I'd want is to be the poor schmoo who's tasked with being the Yammer administrator. I get that it's good to be able to nab "Well, you're a poopyhead!" posts off the archive, but oy.
  • Great post and great comments. I agree with Jesse that Twhirl and Laconica is the best solution. You can keep Laconica behind the firewall if that suits you or have two Laconica installations, on in front of the firewall and one behind the firewall, and use the twhirl client to feed both.
  • I keep coming back to this. I love Twhirl and we've been using Yammer inside our company with great success since launch. I know Yammer is trying to get Twhirl to work with them, and I'd welcome that. But I have Twhirl up right beside my Yammer AIR app and I'm not sure I see the difference (beside firewall issues) between that and having two Twhirl tabs. Having FF and Twitter open in Twhirl looks, except for color, just like having Yammer and Twhirl open at the same time.
  • I think ultimately the idea is giving companies more options. We're launching Present.ly in this same space next week, and with it the option for enterprises to install a private Present.ly instance inside the firewall.

    Laconi.ca may well be the best solution for some companies, while a hosted solution like Present.ly or Yammer may work for others. For one thing, it will certainly be less expensive to use a hosted solution than to dedicate a server or multiple servers to an internally hosted service. It's all about matching the feature set, security concerns, and general feel of the solution to the problem.
  • I am sorry i wasnt saying Digsby value is IM Digsby value in in the ability to login into all my twitter accounts ALL AT ONCE i have 12 accounts and all my email accounts at once.
  • The "inside the firewall" component of the solution is what is key. Trust me, few enterprises are willing to relinquish control (at least total control) of enterprise apps, be it collaboration, document management, IM et al. to a pure cloud computing solution managed entirely by a private firm.

    This is where your twhirl option becomes very interesting. Naturally, any enterprise systems admin will have to analyse this for due diligence issues surround IP ownership, not to mention enterprise IT compliance issues...

    That being said, I find your post great for revealing this most interesting enterprise twitter option.

    Rob
  • Ricardo Sueiras
    Yammer is a much more engaging prospect for the enterprise. In the three days we have had it virally enabled within our (very large) enterprise we have had much more active participation than the equiv. Twitter + pick your choice of tools&clients. And we have tried to engage people in Twitter for some time, but have had very poor takeup.

    In a nutshell that is why IMHO, I think Yammer does stand a chance - it does one thing, but it does it very well.
  • When I saw Yammer, I was disappointed it won (it's not innovative) and I wanted it for the company I work for. Now I'm glad to learn that a self-hosted solution exists without having to get into Yammer. It might take me a year to convince management that internal microblogging can add value to dislocated teams though!
  • When I first saw the TechCrunch50 presentation by Yammer all I could think of was "knowledge management made easy."

    Sure we're talking about micro-blogging, inter company communication, and the Web 2.0 world, but finding a knowledge management system that is easy to install/use, maintain, and understand is a breakthrough.

    Companies will decide based on their company needs and resources. If they have the developer power then they may choose to go with the custom Identi.ca but if they are resource short, then Yammer makes more sense.

    Either way, companies now have a couple of exciting, intuitive, and very low cost ways to implement a knowledge management system.
  • Having used both Yammer and Laconi.ca, it's hard to choose just one solution and recommend it for an enterprise. I can definitely see the advantages of both. Keep in mind that many companies already have their own XMPP servers in place and setting up the email routing would be pretty simple. Getting a Laconi.ca instance going isn't exactly pleasant, but it's liveable. Like others have said, Laconi.ca lives on the company network instead of outside of it, which gives them greater control over the system AND the content.

    Twhirl's integration with Laconi.ca makes it a more attractive combination, since Twhirl itself is one of the leading third-party clients for Twitter.
  • We are using Yammer for the last few days as an experiment. The uptake within the organization has been rapid. It seems to have great potential for quick knowledge distribution esp. where one needs a sentence/statement and a link. Not so good for a detailed discussion on a specific topic where one has a lot to put across (like forums or like the discussion here on this blog). Secondly isolating by groups is needed i.e. not all tweets are relevant to all. Tagging helps but that needs to be imposed i.e. use standard tags only else can very well get out of control. A lot of companies would not really go through the pain of installing laconi.ca and twhirl across the organization imho atleast the non-tech ones at this point in time. Maybe in the near future these systems would be routine.
  • Daniel
    "Behind firewall" is actually a problem for the business side in big companies. Therefore Yammer is a perfect solution. You don't have to bother the CIO (and you know it's impossible to do that if you are an "simple" end user). You can reach it whereever you are. You can handle fairly internal stuff there.
    It's a business solution, like many new services in the cloud.
  • Carl
  • Travis James
    I have been trying to get people in my company (consulting engineering firm) to use Yammer for the past month. I will tell you there is no way I could sell this idea to my company unless it was simple to get everyone up on it. I am not an IT guy, I am an engineer so I needed a solution that I could introduce and then continue on my other responsibilities. I am not really sure what sort of IT responsibility there is for the Twhirl Laconi.ca partnership, but it would have to be easy to install and manage. Finally, as far as I can tell (I haven’t been using Twhirl for very long) Twhirl doesn’t have a group function. Would this capability be made possible by Laconi.ca? In my opinion the gathering of related information in the same place is mandatory. Yammer has been meeting my expectations and I hope they continue. If you have suggestions for me on how to better understand Laconi.ca, I would appreciate them. –ptrav37
  • Daneel
    What about AlertThingy integration with Yammer? Doesn't this have the same effect as Twirl with Laconica?
  • brianbeirne
    You could also try the service Present.ly. Similar to the rest but completely behind the firewall. Also, it's used by some big names in the IT industry.
  • chris
    i think you're wrong. I'm trying to get my government agency involved in an internal social network, and they don't want employees to be able to access other social media sites.
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