Yammer It Up
In my day job – that as a web developer and graphics designer for a Portland Oregon church – one tool that I’ve experimented with and have found more and more use for is something called Yammer. It was a recent winner of the TechCrunch50 award, which is one of the larger yearly events that recognizes the best web tools being developed by cutting edge companies around the world.
Why Yammer? One of the great challenges in any organization with teams of people working on projects is communication. Essentially, what Yammer provides is Twitter-like services to organizations so you can track your team – what they’re working on plus anything they want to pass along – via a simple web interface and/or a desktop application (available for all platforms). The service itself is domain-name based which means that it’s limited to JUST your organization and only users with an email account under your domain name can be a part of your Yammer network.
Example: If I ran a cool company like “Snowboarding Year-Round, Unlimited” and our domain name was “snowyearround.com” – I can create a Yammer network for my domain name and add anyone in my organization to the network like “joe@snowyearround.com” and “katie@snowyearround.com” and even “slacker@snowyearround.com” to make sure he stays on task.
Cost? It’s free unless you want some of the advanced features such as the ability to add a logo and do some other higher level management tasks. The free version is more than ample to accomplish the tasks we need.
Side-note – for all you fellow geeks out there, this was a bit of a controversial choice for TechCrunch because Yammer shares a LOT of similarities with the already popular Twitter. Many were upset that they didn’t pick a company doing something truly “new” and “unique”… Personally, I just like it when people see a need and set out to fill it. Good job Yammer…
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Dropbox Goes Prime-Time
Do you find yourself working with team members beyond those in your immediate work environment (outside your office network) and need to edit/share/track multiple files? Are you finding the transfer of large files to be rather “inconvenient”?
Well, now there’s Dropbox – a super intuitive application that works across the three major platforms (Windows, Mac & Linux) that allows you to publish and track files easily. Visit the website and check out the video demo. This does what I always hoped iDisk/MobileMe would do…but really never did.
It’s a free service for 2.0GB. Beyond that, there’s a pricing model but for the life of me I couldn’t find a way to pay for more. I’m wondering if the “payment” option won’t kick in till I near the 2GB space limit. I did find a reference to a 50GB for $10/mo. model that appears to be in place for some early adopters.
If I were to rate this application/service…it’s an easy 10 out of 10.
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Factors That Improve Online Experience
The folks over at idea have made their recent survey available for download. This is a marvelous study that is based on a good sampling of internet users and they focused on three “pools” or groups of people: 1) Nonprofit Organizations & Cities, 2) Web Designers & Firms, and 3) General Public.
Whether you are a web developer or have oversight over your organization’s website, this is a good and concise analysis that is worth reading.
To view and download their full report, click here.
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