Hank Luhring’s Blog

I heard about Yammer from the TWIST podcast (This Week In STartups).  TWIST is hosted by Jason Calicanis, a frequent guest on TWIT (This Week In Tech), and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine.

I was listening today to Jason talking with David Sacks, the CEO of Yammer.  David also founded Geni.com, and before that he was a co-founder of PayPal.

Both Yammer.com and Geni.com are really nice Web 2.0 applications.  Check out Geni.com and see how easy it is to get started on your family tree.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything THAT easy!

At Geni.com, they needed an internal application for collaboration, so they wrote one.  It has elements of Twitter and Facebook, but is private, and internal to the company.

The application they wrote worked so well for them that they decided to start another company dedicated to that application.  That’s what is now Yammer. 

I thought it might be good to try Yammer out at IssueTrak.  I thought I’d start small, so I invited just three people, and then quickly jumped over to Outlook and composed an email explaining about Yammer.   Before I could hit “send” the people I invited had invited lots of other IssueTrak people, they had uploaded their photos, they had posted messages.  I’ve never seen anything take off so fast!  I quickly sent a followup email saying go ahead, invite everyone in the company! 

IssueTrak has been on Yammer for less than an hour.  There is an org chart fleshed out, and 20 people are enrolled already, several with their pictures uploaded!  Amazing!

There is a great new site to get answers to questions regarding servers, networking and general IT.  It’s called ServerFault.com.  It was set up by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, the two fellows who created StackOverlow.com, probably the best site on the Internet to get programming questions answered.  StackOverflow is now getting over 3.5 million unique visitors per month.

Jeff Atwood writes a blog called Coding Horror.  Joel has Joel on Sofware. One of Joel’s popular posts  described questions to ask of a prospective employer if you’re looking for a programming job.  If the company doesn’t follow certain best practices, you might not want to work there.

Someone on ServerFault asked if there were similar questions to ask to see if a company was doing IT right.  Here’s the link to that post.

What was very interesting to me was that the question that got the most votes was “Do you use an incident/ticket tracking system?”.  As of this writing, that question got 37 votes.

The question “Do you perform system backups, and do test restores regularly?” got 33 votes.

We like to think that our type of software is important to organizations doing IT.  It was surprising to see that the use of tracking software for IT got even more votes than doing backups!