Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’ (source)

I would describe Yammer as the in-house Twitter for companies, with more than 140 characters allowed.

Since I don’t work for an organization or company I haven’t had the chance to experiment with it. You can only form a network when using a valid company email address, meaning all with the same domain-name. This is to prevent ’strangers’ to get into the network.

However, last week my co-worker Joitske suggested for me to take part in an initiative by her and Christian to join the ‘non-existing organization for independent consultants net4dev.org’. By assigning people an email address using that domain we can now exchange more in depth about work, without having to worry clients (or family) ‘listening in’ to what you’re saying.

We’re only using it for a week and it needs more members (interested?), but I can see this can grow into a great networking tool for us independent workers.