Yammer – Enterprise MicroBlogging

I’ve just been experiencing Yammer.  (http://www.yammer.com/) It’s a pretty neat service, with a lot of familiar concepts.  If you’ve used Twitter, you can use Yammer.

One of the very nice features is that you can create ‘groups’ and assign comments to the groups – the comments are still displayed in your ‘global timeline’ but having them all pre-filtered is rather nice.

I’m unsure how it’s going to scale to 100’s of users and 100’s of groups giving 1000’s of comments, but there’s certainly something compelling about using it as an interaction technology.

#yam becoming more prevalent in Twitter as well – augh micro-blogging time.

Hazards of change

In the last 2 years things have changed.  I’m no longer spending most of my days writing code, but I spend most of my days understanding organisations.  The bank where I work is big, and has a lot of different (and old) systems that all need to talk to each other.  I have to spend a lot of time trying to wonder why they were built that way in the first place, and also how to sensibly make change to systems so it can be done in a consistent, safe and reliable way.

What I struggle to communicate with people that most of the time I’m producing nothing, other than wiring my brain to understand how things are.  Then there’s a burst of activity where I’ll produce some designs and direction (and maybe a pattern or two) for people to follow.

Some days I feel like I’m only working for 15 minutes, but I go home very tired after thinking and researching like I’ve worked for 10.

Don’t underestimate how hard change can be, and evaluation of that change is very important.

Number 5 is alive

I finally got myself sorted and got my blog working again.  Now I’ll have to find some time to write things.

The integration between blog and website isn’t as pro as it was before.  Mostly because I did this myself rather than use the elite skills of Travis Winters.  Oh well.  One does what one can.

I might have to steal some Trav time to fix up the banner.  It’s “ok”, but I’d rather it was more consistent with the rest of the site.