Yammer Adds Feeds to Your Company Stream

Yammer — the “twitter-for-business” microblogging system — has added the ability for you to add RSS feeds to your company stream. Eric Eldon at VentureBeat likens Yammer’s new feature to consumer lifestreaming services such as FriendFeed, but with (theoretically) a business focus. 

A great practical example would be to create a feed from Google News that tracked mentions of your company, key competitors, industry news or clients.  Your Yammer-using co-workers can then follow any feed setup by another co-worker at your company. And everyone can add their own comments to the stream.

I’ve used Yammer on and off at work. It’s problematic, as IT can’t seem to make up their mind whether to want to block it or not (it’s currently blocked at our firewall). I think Yammer has promise, but only if my colleagues and my manager or direct reports also use it (the “what are you working on” paradigm). But in the interest of research, I’ve added two RSS feeds to the Fluor site. One for “Fluor” and the other for “knowledge management.” Both pull only from Google News. Hopefully I will find out if it spurs any additional interest or traction in a few days. 

Corporations are still struggling to figure out what to do with systems like Yammer, but if Yammer gains acceptance, it could bring real value to the enterprise. It would be very interesting to see if the Yammer API would allow integration with existing employee profile systems, much like Facebook updates.