FYI => A week or so ago I drafted a colleague and we’ve been exploring Yammer.

http://www.Yammer.com

For some time now I’ve been in search of a collaboration tool to replace email. Email *was* great, but in terms of collaboration it’s too dated. It’s still fine for one to one quick messaging, but in terms of multiple stakeholders, managing a project, consolidating ideas, really collaborating, etc. email (to put it bluntly) sucks.

I had looked at Ning but before I could pass judgment they went to a paid model. I wasn’t confident it was the answer so I moved on. Then there was Google Wave. But before that got anywhere, Google discontinued support of it. As of late, I’ve also tried using Facebook Groups but the social aspect of that platform seems to be a distraction and/or a deterrent in some cases.

And now I’ve looped around to Yammer again. In short, imagine Twitter meets Facebook meets (what appears to be a better version of) Facebook Groups. Simple, social and collaborative. One of the big advantages is you can set up your own network and not have to worry about piggybacking on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Yammer becomes a dedicate workspace.

Thus far the tool itself looks very promising. What might be the bottleneck is convincing others (e.g., colleagues and clients) that it’s worth the effort. Not that it’s a lot of effort but some people cringe at setting up an account. I also have a vision to make Yammer (or something similar) the back end communications tool for KYR, HCH and the like.