Our company has over 200 employees on yammer out of about 2000 employees worldwide, so I'd say our adoption is somewhat large enough for me to comment on its dynamics.
Yes, I'd agree that it matches features with a mailing list but the types of messages that are posted on Yammer would be unacceptable to send as a company-wide email. People mostly post updates about where they are, conferences they are attending, and if they're working from home or remotely. Marketing-types tend to post links to the latest techcrunch or gigaom article. Designers tend to post the latest links off of delicious/popular. As far as the character limit, its treated just as twitter and no one posts anything too large.
With a corporate-wide mailing list, everyone would have to read every single message. People tend to correlate the number of recipients with its importance. Yammer messages can be easily ignored and read at leisure. As a poster, this naturally diminishes any inhibition when firing off a message. Perhaps it's just the obvious outcome of a messaging infrastructure wholly separate from our corporate email, which has expectations and political baggage. Maybe this says something about the state of email tools...
Yes, I'd agree that it matches features with a mailing list but the types of messages that are posted on Yammer would be unacceptable to send as a company-wide email. People mostly post updates about where they are, conferences they are attending, and if they're working from home or remotely. Marketing-types tend to post links to the latest techcrunch or gigaom article. Designers tend to post the latest links off of delicious/popular. As far as the character limit, its treated just as twitter and no one posts anything too large.
With a corporate-wide mailing list, everyone would have to read every single message. People tend to correlate the number of recipients with its importance. Yammer messages can be easily ignored and read at leisure. As a poster, this naturally diminishes any inhibition when firing off a message. Perhaps it's just the obvious outcome of a messaging infrastructure wholly separate from our corporate email, which has expectations and political baggage. Maybe this says something about the state of email tools...