Launching Scuttlebutt Pro 1.0 for Yammer

Scuttlebutt: The Yammer App for Mac LoversAfter almost a year of hard labor ^_^ we proudly present Scuttlebutt Pro 1.0, a Mac Yammer client devoid of Air. Say hello to native Mac experience on Yammer and goodbye to the crufty Adobe Air client. Scuttlebutt Pro also provides you with time-saving features such as:

  • Services Menu support – post Yammer updates from any other applications & send attachments directly from the Finder.
  • Background Mode – be clutter-free and Scuttlebutt windowless from the menu bar without any dock icon.
  • Notification Center support – receive new Yammer updates straight from your Mac’s notification center.
  • External Networks support – seamlessly access your Yammer communities directly from the app.
  • Multiple Accounts – be logged in to more than one Yammer account simultaneously without needing to have multiple browsers open. 

Allow me to publicly thank these guys for their valuable inputs during the alpha and beta periods (e-mail withheld for privacy reasons)

  • Toby Griffin
  • Nathan Haug
  • Kevin Laws
  • Andreas Marienborg

What’s behind the name

The app was to be called Water Cooler, named after the water cooler effect. Studies have shown that there are a lot of knowledge sharing that happens around water coolers – or otherwise the pantry – where employees take a short break for a drink of water and sometimes exchange stories and tips. In this spirit, Yammer is a virtual water cooler where it aims to foster the same types of conversations but across the globe and among different time zones. But alas we couldn’t get a good domain name for it – both watercooler.com and watercoolerapp.com were already squatted. These domain names were registered but wasn’t being used for any website (as of this writing).

Thankfully scuttlebuttapp.com was available. So we registered the domain name and changed the app’s name to Scuttlebutt. I was looking for something similar to water cooler in the spirit of Yammer, which centers around talking and socializing.  Gabble (another Yammer client which precedes Scuttlebutt) is named this way. Thus we settled on Scuttlebutt – since gossips are among the things that happens around water coolers and by extension, Yammer.

How it came to be

I was introduced to Yammer while working for PayPal back in 2011. At that time they were among the big Yammer users. It probably helps that Yammer’s CEO at the time, David Sacks, is part of the PayPal mafia and one of it’s founders, Peter Thiel, also invested in Yammer.

When Justin Vincent (of the TechZing Podcast fame) was looking to host his startup community (StartupGuild), I pointed him to Yammer. He then migrated it over and even managed to get Yammer to sponsor StartupGuild as a premium network.

So I was in three Yammer networks – PayPal, StartupGuild, and eBay (yes, they were two separate networks for eBay and PayPal). The 1.x version of Yammer’s desktop client supports these just fine. Unfortunately they took out multiple networks support from the 1.x version and I had to resort to use the iOS client to access those three networks.

Making a Yammer app for the Mac have crossed my mind a few times. Especially since Yammer promised to do it since a long time but haven’t gotten it out the door. But I was doubtful since it looks like Yammer (the people behind the company) are a big Mac user and they could have been secretly brewing a Cocoa app to replace the suboptimal Adobe Air client. 

At the time I was developing a Twitter client for educators, so I was quite busy chugging on it apart from my day job. Unfortunately making a social network application for school teachers is a bad idea – no matter whether bleeding-edge research said how social media could benefit formal education. The key issue was that many schools actively discourage teachers from using social media, especially when students can interact with them. Moreover cases of teachers getting reprimanded or even losing their job over social media use does nothing to help its adoption as part of the formal education process. Thus I had to stop working on it, doubting its viability.

Fortunately Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion. Since they have been postponing making a Mac client for quite some time, having Microsoft as their new master could mean that the Mac will be even lower at their priority list. Which is an opportunity for me to go in. Fast forward about 11 months later, now you can get uncompromised Mac experience in your Yammer sessions.

Get your copy now

Download a free 30 day trial copy of Scuttlebutt Pro by entering your email address in the form below. You can subscribe at any time and we wont share your e-mail with 3rd parties.

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If you tick the “beta tester” box above, you’ll also be notified of beta versions of Scuttlebutt and have your say on the app.

Our sincere thanks

Please let me extend our gratitude for folks in PayPal for helping me out during my time there, Yammer for allowing Scuttlebutt to exist, Apple for making such a great platform, and last (but not least) Microsoft for buying Yammer. In fact if you’re a part of these companies, you can use Scuttlebutt Pro for free. Simply associate Scuttlebutt Pro with a Yammer account from any one of these networks and you’ll be able to activate it for free:

  • apple.com
  • ebay.com
  • microsoft.com
  • yammer-inc.com
You can use it with any additional Yammer accounts as long as you still have valid access to any of the above networks. This offer is only valid for Scuttlebutt Pro that you download directly from us.

Enjoy Scuttlebutt!

Until next time.

 

 

 

 

 


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