A Yammer Home Page

Yammer offers organizations private collaboration sites similar to public social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter. Shown here is a user’s Yammer home page (with some elements obscured for privacy).

At center is the user’s newsfeed, which lists recent activity of other users on the site, such as the posting of a new file previewed at bottom center. At top, the user has options to post content; for example, the user can post a personal status update, a document or image, a poll, or other content. The user can also limit content displayed in the newsfeed to top items (as ranked by Yammer) or to people, groups, and topics that the user has “followed” (chosen to receive updates for).

Users can “like” posts, reply to them to start a conversation, or share posts with other users. As on the Twitter microblogging service, text in posts and replies can mention a person (for example, “@wesmiller”) or a topic (for example, “#compatibility”). Likes, mentions, and topics all help users target and discover content: for example, a user can follow a topic so that any mentions of the topic appear in the newsfeed, and a user’s newsfeed will generally display posts that mention the user.