For businesses, Yammer seems to be an interesting spin on Twitter. Launched just in September, Yammer is for users who have the same corporate email addresses, allowing employees to share updates of their activities with their co-workers.

Have I lost some of you? What follows is for those who are unfamiliar with Twitter.

Essentially, Twitter is micro-blogging. In this age of iPhones, Blackberry’s, instant messaging, anyone can have a Twitter account (it’s free) where you can immediately post a message about “what you are doing” — with one caveat: the message (”tweet”) can only be up to a maximum of 140 characters in length. Twitter says it has over 3.2 million registered accounts.

Many use it as a means to drive traffic to their website or blog … journalists and other organizations as an additional distribution channel for their commentary (albeit, limited) or for breaking news stories (NASA used Twitter to break the “ice found on Mars” news) … some as a means to instantly connect with family and friends (”It’s a girl!”) … politicians to connect with their constituents (many have attributed the huge amount of Obama Barack supporters on Twitter due to his campaign’s iPhone app) … others to reach out and connect on social issues (CNN reported that Twitter followers of UC Berkeley student James Buck played a role in having him and his translator Mohammed Maree quickly released from a Cairo jail after they were arrested for photographing an anti-government protest.)

All of this means that users can follow the “feeds” of others. And, yes, sometimes that can be just plain flattering (see above).

I can’t promise I’ll be that active on Twitter, or truly insightful or all-the-time meaningful; but, for what it’s worth I’m here:

http://www.twitter.com/doreenatdms .