RefreshingApps.com

Yammer was the winner of this years TechCrunch50. It’s basically like Twitter for work and inter company communications. Launched by former PayPal COO David Sacks it was initially used within Geni.com.

The idea is that you can invite work colleagues to join your network, it uses the host domain name of the email address you started the group with as that group’s name. The limiting factor is that only people who have an email address of the same hostname will be allowed to join in.

The Adobe AIR desktop client for Yammer is one of a host of apps using their API. Others include an iPhone and blackberry apps. I’m starting to see more of this clustering of apps for new startups, it’s great to see Adobe AIR being used towards more of the corporate market.

Yammer makes no secret of the blatant UX and design elements from Twitter, so it’s no surprise that the Yammer AIR client is very similar to the Twitter clients built on the AIR platform. You can do the usual following of people within your organisation and interestingly there is also threading. Some of the options just open up a new window in your browser to then access the site, profiles for instance. I’m not sure if this is an AIR client issue or a lacking API.

Interestingly in the settings menu you can add extra accounts, something that would be ultra useful in many Twitter clients. The update refresh rate is set at 30 seconds by default and there is no mention of request time limits like Twitter. The settings menu also contains options for how the alerting works, default font sizing and colour scheme.

Design eye

The colour scheme is nice and the logo looks good on the app and in the dock. As mentioned above you can alter the colour scheme. This would be a really good opportunity to allow an organization to produce it’s own colour theme and possibly upload a custom logo?

The UI is clean but can’t help noticing a striking similarity to Tweetdeck in that when you mouse over a posts avatar you get four buttons for replying, following, viewing the thread and profile. Hmmm.

When updating the icon on the top bar actually rotates which is a nice visual indicator that there is some activity.

There is some inconsistency in some of the wording. When you mouse over the reply link in a post the tooltip displays ‘reply to this update’ yet if you mouse over the button inside the avatar the tooltip says ‘reply to this message’. It’s a small thing but your users will notice, be consistent and concise.

I’m not sure if Yammer has the same 140 chars limit that Twitter has as no indication is given, the input box just keeps on growing. Bizarrely there is no send or submit button? Can we have one please?

Technical eye

Built using Adobe Flex 3 and the Yammer API. The Yammer AIR client uses oAuth for it’s authentication.