Since Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, the startup has continued to improve on its already solid product, releasing mobile apps and new desktop clients, adding threaded conversations, hosted versions and more. The fact is that in just under two years, Yammer is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (which includes 80% of the Fortune 500). That’s impressive growth for the startup, which has raised $15 million in funding and is doubling revenue every quarter. But the social enterprise arena is competitive with Salesforce Chatter, Jive, Socialcast and many others vying for a piece of the pie. However, Yammer is going to be releasing a new version of its application at TechCrunch Disrupt this fall which could be a game-changer.

The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.

An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.

Yammer is also going to be upgrading content sharing by allowing users to preview information in shared links. The startup has also added a Q&A app that encourages workers to ask questions and find answers from a database, and includes a polling application. Additionally, the new version of Yammer will allow users to assign a task resulting from conversations and track its completion, and will include the ability to tag content with topics, making it easier to find conversations by subject.

Another integral part of Yammer’s transformation into an open social platform is the ability to install third-party applications. Yammer will soon give third-party developers the ability to sell and create applications like those that Yammer will now offer. It’s similar in theory to the Google Apps marketplace.

In terms of communications functionality, Yammer is adding the ability to send Direct Messages to multiple parties, and a chat feature, which will allow users to create chat rooms that can be archived or searchable. Missed chats will automatically become direct messages.

A new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. And a new notification feed will alert users in real time about co-worker actions that affect them.

Yammer CEO and founder David Sacks tells me the feed is one of the key components of social networking and existing enterprise platforms have been built before the concept of a realtime feed. Yammer’s next-generation application, he says, will help enterprises create a social communications platform around data and communications.

In terms of the big picture view of the social enterprise, Sacks believes that the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. Half of the social web entails sites like Facebook and Twitter, explains Sacks, and the other half will be around enterprise social networking. And he makes it very clear that Yammer hopes to be the de-facto application for companies, both big and small, to use for their social networking efforts.

Of course, it’s safe to assume that either an existing social enterprise player, such as Jive, or even Google may want to purchase Yammer to boost their own offerings. Sacks says he’s received considerable interest in his company, but for now he wants to focus in creating the best product in the space. That, he says, is going to be the new version of Yammer.

For some in Silicon Valley, Asia remains an alluring black box. A promising world with pockets of hyper growth, obscured by a tangled web of unfamiliar languages, customs, regulations and native ecosystems. Although the walls are coming down fast, the road to Asia’s markets remains an intimidating one for many.

Enter Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups (a recently launched $30M super angel fund) and Geeks On A Plane, a program that takes tech entrepreneurs and investors to emerging markets. In its own small way, Geeks On A Plane is attempting to bridge that gap between the Valley and the rest of the world. Earlier this year, roughly 55 “Geeks” traveled to several key hot spots in Asia, including Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul and Beijing, to connect with the region’s top entrepreneurs, to mingle with Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and to sample local tech conferences like Shanghai World Expo and CHINICT.

“Asia is easily a third, possibly close to half of the world’s population, I think there’s a lot of innovation and a lot of growth that is happening in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” McClure says. “Some of the internet models that we’ve seen are starting to be transferred over there, and actually a lot of the internet business models are being copied over here…There’s actually an explosion of social networks happening in all those countries.”

Although McClure doesn’t consider himself an expert in doing business in Asia, through his trips and his new relationships, he says he now has a better understanding of the internal dynamics of Asia’s disparate markets and is acutely aware of common Western misconceptions. In particular, he says it was very eye opening to learn how advanced China actually is and how many have underestimated the region’s technological and economic progress.

“Well I think people tend to look at China as being a pretty big opportunity but they also tend to think about China as being a little bit behind and I think that’s just really the wrong impression. China has actually got more internet users than the US, they certainly have more mobile devices than the US…You know the top 10% of the Chinese population probably has more average spending power than the average US citizen…and they’re buying a lot of cars, they’re buying a lot of houses, they’re buying a lot of consumer products online.”

While not everyone can join a Geeks On A Plane Tour, Dave McClure is sharing a collection of mini-documentaries from his latest trip with TechCrunch TV. The videos were shot and produced by Ben Henretig, founder of Micro-Documentaries, a new startup that creates highly polished, short (hence micro) videos for clients. The first of four episodes is on their trip to Shanghai (second video from the top). You can also watch McClure’s interview with TechCrunch TV, where he discusses his new fund and expounds on his trip to Asia (first video).

EverFi has created a SaaS application for schools to help educate young adults on financial literacy, student loan default prevention, filing taxes, credit card debt and more. The application’s curriculum incorporates virtual worlds, gaming, social media and videos to help teach children these life skills.

For example, the company’s Buttonwood platform, aims to prevent teenagers from student loan defaults. The application includes a Second Life-like virtual world where users can learn and implement key financial literacy concepts, such as credit worthiness, the loan application process, interest rates and more.

Currently over 2,000 public schools in 47 states will be using EverFi, with the company’s reach expected to more than double in 2011. While EverFi’s technology is not free to use, the platform’s use in public schools is completely funded by outside corporations and foundations that license its programs. Partners include United Negro College Fund, Capital One, Genworth Corporation, U.S. Bank, PayPal, BB&T Corporation, and others.

The company plans to use the funding for new product development and additional hires.

AOL users watch a good amount of video, and the company was regularly featured as one of the top ten video properties in comScore’s Video Metrix — that is, until the measurement firm changed its methodology for counting unique viewers and viewing sessions. However, much of that content comes from distribution partners that syndicate content to AOL’s videos site.

Details on the YouTube portion of the deal are limited, so we’ve reached out to AOL for clarification. It’s not clear, for instance, if AOL will also distribute its partner videos through YouTube as well, or if the deal includes only AOL original content. If the latter, it will be interesting to see how much video that entails — how many AOL videos it has in its library and how many it produces on a daily or weekly basis, as opposed to how many come from distribution agreement. If syndicated content is included, it’s not clear how distribution partners will be compensated as part of the deal, especially as many of them have deals with YouTube of their own.

We also don’t know if AOL plans to break its YouTube distribution into branded channels for different sites or video verticals, or if they will exist solely on a single AOL video channel. It would make more sense for AOL to focus on verticals, as it will be able to break out videos about travel, sports, entertainment and other subjects and target advertising accordingly.

Finally, the search deal includes a revenue-sharing component, which will include Google ad formats being added to AOL sites. I wonder if the revenue-share agreement also extends to the YouTube portion of the deal, and if so, which party will be selling the ads that run up against AOL videos on YouTube. If it’s AOL doing the selling, the YouTube deal could certainly bring more eyeballs to its original content, but will it come at the expense of CPMs because the videos are appearing on a site known for its UGC videos? That will be an important point, especially as AOL’s advertising revenues have been in freefall lately.

While there are certainly a lot of questions left unanswered, the YouTube deal could bring some significant volume to AOL’s video properties. We’ll update this post once we hear back from AOL and know more.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: New Business Models For Pay TV Services (subscription required)

Armstrong said in a statement “Today is another important step in the turnaround of AOL…AOL users will be getting a better search and search ads experience from the best search company in the world – Google. After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

As part of the agreement Google will power search across AOL’s networks, will provide AOL with ad formats, and will power mobile search. And AOL and YouTube have agreed to bring AOL’s video content to YouTube.

It’s a big win for Google, since Microsoft’s Bing was clearly after the deal as well. But Armstrong said in February that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” Google sends massive traffic to AOL sites, which could have made it a more attractive partner than Bing. Of course, Bing isn’t lacking in its own deals-the search engine now counts Yahoo as a partner.

As a service, Twitter is experiencing increasing difficulties with the demand constantly being heaped upon it from the many client applications and mashups using the REST API. Switching over to streaming is definitely a more effective means of relieving all that pressure. The bonus is that apps built to use this torrent of data can benefit from real-time updates.

This is fantastic news for desktop Twitter clients and apps that do huge processing of individual tweets because it eventually means there could be no rate limit. Rather than polling and caching (to avoid the rate limit), all your app will need to do is listen out for updates, queue them and process when ready. Twitter’s user stream API is also currently in beta, with desktop-only clients for now.

Access to the site streams beta will be opened wider than user streams, but is currently on a whitelist basis, requiring developers to request access and await authorization. There are some usage limits for now, although it’s expected that these will be lifted as the API steadily comes out of beta. The Streaming API team over at Twitter HQ have also made it quite clear that functionality is likely to break during the beta and endpoints will definitely change during the shift over to a full-strength production setup.

via Techcrunch, photo by saebaryo

Sponsored by

A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).

Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha).

The Xobni study, an online survey of 2,200 British and American adults conducted in August, holds that the traditional 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo, due to the fact that Americans and Brits can’t stop checking their email. Apparently we sneak a peak at our inboxes while on vacation, weekends, sick days and even when we are (gasp!) in bed.

The press release blames this behavior on the down economy and the iPhone, but I blame it on the fact that we now live most of our lives online, and we feel compelled to check our email/Facebook/Twitter because that’s where most of the exciting stuff is happening anyways.

More highlights from the study/the life we have chosen:

* The 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo. 72% of Americans and 68% of Brits say they regularly check their email on vacations, sick days, and at home in bed.

* Yes, IN BED. Conveniently for Xobni, work email in bed is apparently, you know, like a thing, with 1 in 5 Americans checking email as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing they do at night before falling asleep (Again I can personally vouch for this).

According to Xobni, email has become an addiction, and like most addictions it is fueled by peer pressure:

* 27% check email outside of regular working hours because they feel it is expected.

* 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle/overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation.

Everyone in the world agrees that managing email has become a challenge to our sanity. And various companies are scrambling towards solutions including Google with its recent Gmail Priority Inbox launch and Xobni, obviously. My favorite low-fi way to deal with the bottleneck is a service called Sentenc.es which makes it clear to your email reader that you are limited to short responses.

Even though I’m not sure how well that will work, in bed.

Video, vaguely related.

Email overload image above: Ario_

So how did it go? Loopt says 1,300 people checked in to a single taco truck in San Francisco, and 80% of those people have already bought tickets on Virgin America for flights. It was Virgin’s fifth highest revenue day ever, says Loopt (we’re confirming with Virgin).

Added Loopt CEO Sam Altman by email: “You should also mention that we are on fire.” And indeed they are. Loopt has more than four million users, despite the fact that they are covered far less often than the smaller Foursquare. Loopt is quietly becoming a very large presence in the mobile, um, presence war.

Also, Virgin America doesn’t suck.

Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it.

Like most people, I wander into hyperbole from time to time. But it has now been a few days since I first played with Twitter for iPad, and I still think it is hands-down the best iPad app out there. It’s that good. With all due respect to Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, and Pulse, this is now going to be my go-to app for just about everything related to reading news. It’s simply such a great experience for reading tweets — and more importantly, reading the links your friends share.

What Twitter has done is create an amazing user experience for reading information. This is thanks to an intuitive user interface that layers on top of itself. So, for example, if I click on a link in my tweet stream, I’ll have a new layer that rolls over to show that webpage in a customized browser window. If you’ve used Flipboard, it’s somewhat similar, but better because it’s much easier to go back to where ever you previously were before you clicked the link. You simply swipe something to the side to move it temporarily or swipe it again to get it off the screen (in portrait mode anyway, where there’s less space).

Something else that’s awesome: when you highlight a tweet by clicking on it, it’s now pinned to the top or bottom of the screen as you scroll through your stream. This is great if it’s something you want to reference. A lot of thought has been put into these type of saving state actions within this app. It’s simple to save a draft and go back to it, for example (much easier than with Twitter for iPhone). Or to reference one of these pinned tweets in your own tweet.

There are also some great new gestures that Twitter came up with for this app. For example, if you pinch-outward on a tweet, it will unfold to show you more information about the Twitter user. Better may be the way you can swipe down with two fingers on any tweet to see a full conversation in context. It’s the little things like this that make the app great — Apple-like, even.

Overall, the app looks and feels quite a bit different from Twitter for iPhone (which Twitter built from Tweetie — developer Loren Brichter’s client that they acquired earlier this year). But Twitter’s Leland Rechis assures me it’s using all the same stuff on the backend. In fact, Twitter is now a universal app — meaning it’s one app that will work on both the iPhone and iPad, it will just look different depending on which device you’re using it on.

Rechis also says Twitter started experimenting with some newer things on the iPad version that haven’t yet been brought to the iPhone version, but undoubtedly will. A great example here is that when you click through to a user’s profile page, you’ll see at the bottom a list of users similar to that user that you may like to follow.

Rechis also notes the importance of the logged-out view — something Twitter worked on before the iPhone version launch. Twitter wants to make the service as useful as possible to people even if they don’t have an account. The idea, of course, is that they’ll hopefully sign up for one — and this app may give them the most reason to yet. When logged out, you’ll be able to see tweet streams based on hot topics.

“Tweets in general are not just what I’m doing, they have an incredible amount of metadata,” Rechis says speaking to why they created this layering idea for the app. Almost 25 percent of all tweets now have a link in them, he says. This app is perfect for those tweets, and content consumption and exploration in general.

Rechis notes that one of his favorite things about tablets is how they eliminate window management. At the same time, you need some way to manage all this information. He notes that Brichter’s original concept was stacks of sheets of paper that you quickly shuffle through. Other members of Twitter including Rechis refined that idea and the end result is Twitter for iPad.

That’s roughly 750 words about the app — but you really just need to see it, and use it. It will definitely be my go-to way to browse Twitter from now on. It’s that good.

Look for it in the App Store shortly. It will be a free download.

Update: I should note that for some of these more advanced gestures, there is a slight learning curve. That said, you can do everything without using those gestures, so it’s not a big deal — it’s just icing on the cake. And yes, Twitter is trying to come up with the best way to teach users about these new gestures.

Right now, many of you are likely downloading iTunes 10, the latest version of Apple’s media software. The most notable feature in this new version is Ping, Apple’s first stab at building a music social network (or really any kind of social network). It’s interesting on a number of levels, but even the most basic level is pretty interesting: Ping’s social graph.

First of all, to use Ping at all you have to opt-in to it. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs touted the 160 million built-in users (it’s currently available in iTunes in 23 countries), that’s a bit misleading because many people won’t opt-in to using it — many of them for no other reason than they’re lazy or just don’t care. But assuming you do opt-in to it, the next social layer is interesting as well. Immediately, you’re taken to a Privacy Settings page where Apple asks you how you’d like to use the service. This is where you decide if you want to use the friend model, the follow model, or the lurk model.

To be more clear, Apple asks you to decide between two things: do you want to allow people to follow you, or do you want no one to be able to follow you? The latter is a nice option because you can still use Ping, you simply use it as a lurker. You can see what other people with public profiles are doing, but they can’t see what you are doing. The other option is to let people follow you — but there’s a sub option to this. You can either let anyone follow you (think: Twitter) or you can get notifications to approve everyone who wants to follow you (think: Facebook).

Leave it to Apple to come up with a social graph dynamic that is fairly complicated but made to seem simple. I mean, this is almost the opposite of many of Facebook’s convoluted social rules. My argument recently has been that Facebook should have a simplified option to allow you to have both friends and followers — you know, like what Apple is doing here. Instead, everyone on Facebook is a friend or they’re some sub-list quasi-friend that you really hate but are connected with anyway. Or something. Or you can make a Page — which creates double the work for you and those people who also happen to be friends and followers. It’s just so ugh.

I didn’t even consider this lurker option for Facebook because quite frankly, it would freak out a lot of people. But Apple does this smartly as well. While you’re free to roam and and see other public updates, if you do want to post something like a comment, your identity is shown. So no, there will be no anonymous trolling.

I haven’t used Ping enough to tell if it will actually be useful. Given that this is Apple’s first real foray into social, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise. But they’ve won the first battle: simple privacy settings. Facebook could learn a thing or two from this.

Apple announced iTunes 10 this morning at their event in San Francisco. The latest version is more than just a minor update, there are several things that have been reworks, including some UI elements. But the biggest addition is obviously Ping, the music social network Apple has baked into iTunes. I got a chance to use it earlier on some demo computers and on the iPhone/iPod touch — it’s very interesting. Now it’s time to see if 160 million built-in users agree.

From the 15 minutes or so I used it earlier, I can also say that it felt noticeably faster than version 9. This has been a huge complaint about the software in the past — that it’s too bloated. Of course, that was also on a brand new machine probably not packed to the brim with media — so we’ll see.

The oddest thing about iTunes 10 isn’t the icon revamp (goodbye CD) — I think it has to be the move of the close, minimize, and expand buttons on the Mac version. They’re now vertically aligned — like a traffic light.

Part of the YCombinator class of 2010, InDinero aims to be the Mint for small businesses and is off to a running start as this latest round is set to close between 1 and 1.5 million. We’ve heard reports that she had to turn investors away, and Mah promises that more “juicy details” about the story behind the funding are yet to come.

Perhaps the closest we’ve got to a female Mark Zuckerberg, Mah founded her first startup at age of 13, and entered into the Computer Science program at Berekley at 15, where she started internshipIN.com. In raising over a million at twenty, the serial entrepreneur’s got a ways to go before she gets jaded.

Here’s recent video of her explaining InDinero’s usefulness and simplicity.

Dance It Up, created by the Dawson Brothers, is ostensibly a viral promotion for the latest Groove Armada single History, off the Black Light album. But in reality, it is a celebration of how awesome street dance is. Sort of.

This video is great, no lie, but here are the three reasons I am featuring it:

1) It has been online for a week and only has about 33,000 views. I believe this to be criminally unfair.

2) The YouTube description is pitch perfect:

Groove Armada’s people asked us to make a thirty second viral advert for their new album. But we got carried away and ended up making a street dance film instead. We f*cking love street dance. We hope you like it, but above all… we hope Groove Armada’s accounts department will still pay us.

3) If I write about it here, it might get me to stop IMing it to everyone I know.

Oh, perhaps you’re in the market for some more traditional dance moves? Spreading around today is Dancing at the Movies, which includes dance sequences from a wide array of movies, featuring everyone from Fred Astaire to John Travolta to Patrick Swayze to those kids from Step Up 2.

Forgive its strange Jamie Lee Curtis fixation, and enjoy!

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): The State of Social TV