Twitter y Yammer aumentan la productividad de las empresas ?

BITS BLOG. Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive? By Claire Cain Miller October 21, 2008, 11:11 am On Tuesday, The Times published an article I wrote about Twitter and Yammer,two microblogging services that let users blast short messages to a group of virtual followers. Twitter has gotten a lot of buzz since it was created in 2006. Yammer is new on the scene, just six weeks old, with a different goal: to be Twitter for businesses. Yammer was created for employees of Geni, a family tree Web site. When they discovered how useful it was for them, David Sacks, the founder of Geni, decided to spin Yammer off into its own company with $1 million of Geni's venture funding. Mr. Sacks, a PayPal co-founder, now runs both start-ups and is raising a new round of funding for Yammer. On Twitter, people write about the important and the mundane, like, "At school and debating whether I should have more coffee." With a workplace focus, Yammer will not deal in such trivialities, Mr. Sacks said. "People don't want to hear from their friends five times a day about what they're doing. But they do want to hear from their co-workers five times a day about what they're working on," he said. The central question on Twitter, "What are you doing?" is transformed on Yammer to, "What are you working on?" There are other features specific to the office. Unlike Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters, Yammer's users can type as much as they want and reply to specific messages. They can attach photos, documents or videos. Yammer also has user profiles and will soon add groups, so people can have conversations that other employees cannot see. It has plans to include vendors or consultants outside the company network. Users can check Yammer and post updates from the Web, instant message services or phones. And just why do we need this when e-mail and instant messaging do similar things? E-mail no longer serves its proper purpose, which is to request an active response, Mr. Sacks said. http://www.yammer.com All the rest of the stuff that clogs in-boxes — mass e-mails sharing a link to an article, for example, or notifications of company events — makes e-mail less efficient. He wants to move all that to Yammer. Mr. Sacks believes that Yammer can rise above all that. "If we're successful, ultimately people will see e-mail and I.M. as simply delivery channels for Yammer content," he said. On a recent day at Yammer, for example, one employee sent around a link to an article about a new social networking experiment at Yahoo. The company's lawyer wrote that he was working on employee stock option agreements and several employees responded with questions about the options package. Someone announced that the catered lunch menu included California rolls and chicken kebabs. Yammer is free for anyone with a company e-mail address. Mr. Sacks hopes that it spreads within companies and catches the eye of the higher-ups. At that point, a worried I.T. employee or executive usually calls Yammer and asks about the security features. Those include limiting the I.P. addresses that can read a company account, requiring passwords, cutting off ex-employees and removing certain messages. Once a company administrator takes over, Yammer charges $1 per user per month. Mr. Sacks hopes to skirt the I.T. department and empower employees. "Instead of the most jaded person about new technology in the company making the decision, the most forward-thinking person in the company can do it," he said. People are itching to use the Web tools they use at home in the office, he said, and this is a way to speed the process. It also saves Yammer money on an expensive enterprise salesforce. Some people have complained that this strategy is tantamount to blackmail, Mr. Sacks said, because it forces companies to sign up to control it since their employees are already using it. He disagrees — an I.T. department can always block Yammer's Web site, he pointed out. In the first six weeks, 60,000 users have signed on, and 4,000 of them have convinced their companies to pay. People at Cisco Systems, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard use it. Mr. Sacks has received calls from a farm equipment supplier with thousands of remote sales reps, a motion picture company that already has 400 employees using Yammer and a casino company that has 25,000 employees in other countries. Yammer is a new way to do a lot of stuff we already do at work. Social enterprise software like Clearspace from Jive Software and SharePoint from Microsoft offer some of these features. Companies already use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with co-workers. For many years, instant messaging has been solving a lot of the problems that Mr. Sacks has with e-mail. What do you think? Do workers need a new way to communicate? Or will Yammer be yet another inbox to keep up with in an already cluttered digital world? Abrir "Post" en sitio web del NYT. Copyright by the New York Times 2008

COPYRIGHT © 2007 DePapaya.com Reproduction in whole or in part, without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.