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…
| 3.0 (1 person) |
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.
| 3.2 |
New Google Brower “Chrome” Is Super-Fast
Here’s a rare instance of me doing a review of a currently Windows-only application. While Google has plans to release a Mac OS version - for now, this release is limited to Windows-only.
So - this morning I fired up Parallels (Windows XP) and installed Chrome for a good look at what all the fuss on the blogosphere is all about. Right out the gate - I’m impressed. I went right to the sites that seem to take a few extra seconds to load and quickly noticed the speed with which Chrome opened and displayed the pages. There’s hardly a lag at all and instead of watching things slowly appear - first text, then graphics and everything else - it’s nice to watch a page just pop out. (ESPN.COM did have more of a traditional lag, largely because their site has so much happening)
Being a Firefox fan personally…and a Mac user almost exclusively - I won’t be using Chrome much since it only resides in my rarely used Parallels area. According to reports, Firefox is also working on an upgrade to their browser that utilizes a fast back-end engine to compete with the speeds that Chrome is running at. We’ll see how soon that comes out.
| 3.2 |
