Business social network Yammer gets upgrade, opens up to apps

Yammer, a social networking platform like Facebook for business professionals, announced that it is launching its expanded suite of social networking tools with third-party app integration for the business professionals of the world. The announcement came at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today.

Yammer is upgrading its original, Twitter-like micro-blogging platform to include a suite of tools that other sites like Facebook and LinkedIn offer users — including a new platform to enable business-to-business software providers like Zendesk to develop third-party Yammer applications. The company has also expanded the platform globally by translating it into 100 different languages.

Yammer 2.0 will allow users to direct message others, create events and run with the other bells and whistles that most social networking applications use today. The new version still holds onto a “news feed” model for its main page but now involves applications and other notifications. Users need to have a company email address, like “@IBM.com,” to be able to access a specific Yammer network.

There are two ways the company makes money, but only one of them is currently active. A number of Yammer’s features will be held behind one of two pay walls — a “silver” model that costs businesses $3 per user per month, and a “gold” model that costs them $5 per user per month. The other involves lead generation — basically producing traffic and interest in a third-party app outside of the Yammer platform.

Yammer has attracted a million users as of a few months ago, and the platform has attracted 80,000 companies since its launch 2 years ago, Apfelberg said. The social enterprise network has already attracted 80 percent of the top companies in the world in the Fortune 500 list in its original micro-blogging platform.