Yammer is almost a pixel-perfect replica of Facebook, except it’s marketed as being geared towards business use, allowing employees to come together and… do all the same things they can do on Facebook.
While the marketing is different, it’s functionally no different at all to Facebook.
Yammer even uses a similar blue colour scheme for crying out loud.
What’s the deal here?
Since Yammer is owned by MicroSoft I assume their lawyers are aware of the similarities with Facebook. What do you imagine they would sue them for and on what grounds?
[Hijack] Yammer is a damned stupid thing to name a business interaction network. Did Microsoft not know the definition of the word? [/Hijack]
why doesn’t google sue yahoo since their websites do the same thing
Unless they changed their usage policy, Facebook cannot be used for a business. We all know they turn a blind eye for it but if Yammer subscribers are businesses and Facebook’s are not (unless the policy is being violated), would that make a difference?
If you think that’s bad, check out the Chinese website Xiaonei, it’s a near perfect clone of Facebook for the Chinese market
Huh? Facebook is very specifically set up to work with businesses. All the business pages you see aren’t just regular pages that people shoehorned their business into, it’s a totally different page. Facebook even gives you metrics like how many people viewed your page, “checked in” at your store, how many people directly saw a ‘status’ you put up vs how many people saw it indirectly (how ‘viral’ it is) etc etc etc.
They have all kinds of business solutions.
Does it really say in their policy somewhere that business aren’t allowed to have a Facebook page? It seems like that would be a pretty big contradiction and create some sort of entrapment if they ever tried to enforce it since they encourage businesses to set up pages since (like Twitter and FourSquare) it attracts more and more users to not only signup but use the mobile app as well.
Facebook says you can’t use a personal identity page for business.
As noted above, there are plenty of other ways you can promote your business on FB, what they forbid is doing it through a personal identity, ie stealth marketing.
Is that like setting up a fake page, that looks like a real person, making friends, checking in at your business, talking about your business etc. When one of your ‘friends’ puts up a status you find a way to bring up your business. Essentially creating a whisper campaign.
So, I take it that Facebook is trying to stop Yammer time.
Microsoft only recently bought Yammer. When they first started, they were similar to Twitter, only for organizations. I have an account set up through my school (I’m neither a teacher nor a student, I’m technology staff). I hadn’t logged into it for nearly three years. They did not look like that (the Facebook lookalike) when I last used it. I agree that it’s a silly service and I don’t find it very useful.
I only know the word to mean chatting 
It means chatting but in a negative way.
Yammering is not chatting pleasantly, that’s for sure.
Boo!
Do you have a link to a profile page? Because the front page looks rather different than Facebook’s. (I’m sure that, unlike Zuckerberg, the designer wasn’t colorblind.) Merely having the same functionality would not be a problem unless they are using the same technology, any more than Google+ or even MySpace can be sued. Or, heck, even LinkedIn.
okay I should have said “chatting incessantly” :smack:
My best guess about this Facebook for or not for business is this:
Facebook encourages businesses to promote themselves to the general public with special Facebook pages.
Facebook does NOT want to be used as an internal communications program within a business.
And I am getting that this latter thing is the point of Yammer.
Is this an accurate summary?