Have you heard of Yammer? If not, you will.
You will likely hear about Yammer after your corporation or business signs a deal with them. Your users will start to flock toward the service and sign up. Lo and behold you will discover that they will be offered a piece of software to install. During the software install they will have the option to invite other users in your organization.
It appears this feature enjoys crawling through your local address book or global address list to invite folks. If you’re in a large organization with thousands of employees, congratulations! You now have a spam attack.
Yammer needs to fix this. Other social startups need to learn from this. Because of this, I’m actively staying away from Yammer, even though my large business is asking us to use it. Screw that. I have work to do.