{"id":2643,"date":"2008-09-11T11:08:15","date_gmt":"2008-09-11T15:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2643"},"modified":"2008-09-11T11:08:15","modified_gmt":"2008-09-11T15:08:15","slug":"yammer-this-thing-is-a-prize-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/09\/11\/yammer-this-thing-is-a-prize-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like more than a few people (as far as I can tell by reading through my blog and other feeds<\/a>) I confess that I was more than a little gobsmacked to find out that Yammer had won the TechCrunch50 prize<\/a>. It may well have been a tough field for the judges, given the number of lame Web 2.0 offerings I read about among the contestants, but I still find it hard to believe that a service that is ultimately a carbon copy of Twitter won the big prize. Before anyone signs in to the comment section to berate me, I understand that Yammer is for the enterprise, and that it has a kind of “we’re holding your employees hostage” business model, where companies have to pay a fee<\/a> to “claim” the users that are chatting on Yammer using their corporate email addresses. <\/p>\n

That said, all this sounds to me (as more than one person<\/a> has pointed out) like something Twitter could roll over one morning and implement without even breaking a sweat (now that its server issues seem to be a thing of the past). Is that really a great business<\/a>? On the one hand, I’m inclined to give David Sacks — the co-founder of genealogy site Geni, where Yammer was apparently created as an internal communications tool — some props for getting an idea and running with it. But it still feels a lot more like a feature that makes more sense as part of Twitter than it does as any kind of standalone business.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the other hand, that’s what a lot of Web “businesses” seem to be: features in search of a business model, or features that are hoping to be acquired by the service that they ultimately belong with. In some ways, of course, Twitter itself seems like a feature that belongs with some other communications tool, so I guess that makes Yammer a feature spinoff from another feature of an actual tool or service. That definitely deserves a prize, but not the one that TC50 gave it.<\/p>\n

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Like more than a few people (as far as I can tell by reading through my blog and other feeds) I confess that I was more than a little gobsmacked to find out that Yammer had won the TechCrunch50 prize. It may well have been a tough field for the judges, given the number of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}