With Twitter on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days, enterprises are seeking similar types of collaborative tools to include in their enterprise suites. Two companies vying for the position of Twitter for the corporate culture are: Locani.ca (open source, free, self-hosted aka behind the fire-wire) and Yammer (free, hosted, desktop AIR client)

At first glance, the major difference between the two is a self-hosted service vs. a hosted service. For businesses, issues of privacy and intellectual property play into choosing the best solution for their internal corporate communication and collaboration solutions.

There are advantages to both platforms. If security is a major issue and you have the administrative bandwidth to spare, then Locani.ca might be the direction to go. Laconi.ca lives on the company network instead of outside of it, which gives an organization greater control over the system and the content. Yammer offers an easy and fast solution and provides companies with administrative features such as adding or removing users and messages along with additional customization and security tools. There’s an interesting discussion about both Laconi.ca and Yammer on Chris Brogan’s blog post, “Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant.”

These applications amplify the trend among business to adopt social media applications to streamline business communications, providing threaded discussions for employees to share ideas and suggestions in one place and collaborate on ongoing projects without having to trudge through several email chains. With the widespread adoption of these social tools in the mainstream market, it’s easy to get employees on board and participating with these familiar applications. In short, popular social networking applications are changing the way we communicate on every level. What’s good for the sixteen year old goose is now good for the corporate gander!

related articles:

Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools like Twitter?

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