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Yammer, the enterprise social networking company that was recently bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, is getting ready to add a new instant messaging feature called Online Now to its main service, enabling users to chat to each other in real time. Online Now will sit alongside existing services that let users post status updates and media as well as send private messages.

The feature was spotted earlier today by TNW, and we have now confirmed exactly what is happening with Yammer itself, including the name: “We will be announcing the chat feature through a press release in a couple of weeks as part of our summer release,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

If you are one of Yammer’s five million users and haven’t spotted an option to chat already, that’s because the chat that is coming out now is part of Yammer’s testing process. Yammer says that it has been implementing different versions of the upcoming User Interface (UI) and randomly displaying them to our users to test it.

“Analytics will then show how users are adopting the various feature versions and we will make the decision based on those results so we can then roll out the best possible product to our customers,” the spokesperson said.

The addition of a new chat feature demonstrates that Yammer is wasting no time sitting on its $1.2 billion laurels post acquisition by Microsoft. But nor is it rolling out products that point to it integrating with its new parent and its sister divisions so quickly, either.

“This is a Yammer developed feature. You will be able to use it within your normal Yammer environment,” the spokesperson said. Meaning: no Skype integration, no Sharepoint integration, and if anything a wider enhancement of Yammer’s own functionality and feature set.

One possibility for how Online Now will work — although, again, this may change before the final product comes out — is that it will feature as an additional tab in the lower right hand corner of the main Yammer communication screen, not unlike Facebook’s own instant messaging feature.

Cindy Alvarez, director of user experience at Yammer, posted a picture earlier this month on Yammer’s customer forums showing what the service looked like in testing mode:

Now all we need is some auto-refreshing action on the main feed and we might just be in business.

VMware announced on Monday a big, $1.05 billion acquisition of software-defined networking company Nicira.

While VMware is a major player in data center virtualization, its purchase of Nicira is meant to make it a similarly large presence in software defined networking as well. That’s a fancy way of saying it wants to take what it did to server virtualization and do it to network infrastructure.

Though most of the deal was for cash, VMware also offered $210 million in assumed unvested equity awards, a small price for what is sure to be a significant investment down the line.

Founded in 2007, Nicira was in stealth mode up until this February, but it’s already attracted attention from companies as large and diverse as AT&T, eBay, Rackspace, and DreamHost, which rely on its Network Virtualization Platform. With the technology, companies can scale their network capacity to keep up with demand, saving both effort and money.

Early Nicira proponent and Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz applauded VMware’s buy. “VMware today [has created] a clear path to becoming the most important infrastructure company across servers, networks and storage for the next 10 years,” he wrote in a blog post.

VMware’s move was particularly prescient, Horowitz notes, because it comes ahead of a future where networking and storage infrastructure will be more reliable and far more elastic. “ VMware just took a giant step towards bringing the future forward,” he said.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Horowitz’s partner Marc Andreessen agreed, noting the parallels between Nicira and VMware. “Nicira is to networking as VMware is to servers,” he said. “And a lot of companies are still kicking themselves for not buying VMware.”

But the Nicira buy is a bit different, because, unlike VMware, Nicira is in a league all on its own. “There’s really no other company like Nicira,” Andreessen said.

The move is also a big deal for Nicra co-founder Martin Casado, who has worked on the company’s virtualization technology for over ten years. “VMware’s purchase is basically a validation of everything that Casado has been working on,” Adreessen said. “Few people believed that you could effectively decouple network software from the server, but that’s exactly what Nicira has done,” he said

While the boards of directors of both companies have already approved the deal, it’s still subject to regulatory approval. Either way, VMware expects the deal to close before the end of the year.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Microsoft just announced that it has now officially completed the acquisition of Yammer, the four-year-old social networking company for enterprises. All the closing conditions have now been met and the Yammer team will now officially join the Microsoft Office Division. After weeks of rumors, the $1.2 billion acquisition was first announced in late June. According to Microsoft, the company is looking forward to “accelerating the adoption of Yammer’s standalone service, and enhancing the social capabilities in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration offerings.”

As Microsoft announced earlier this week, the next version of Office will come with Yammer as a default part of the popular productivity suite. So far, Microsoft hasn’t fully released its plans for how exactly it plans to integrate Yammer into its wider range of enterprise-focused services. At the time of the acquisition, Yammer reportedly had around 4 million registered users and about 20% of those paid for the company’s premium services.

This acquisition, as our own Colleen Taylor and Ingrid Lunden noted when the acquisition was first announced, will give Microsoft the ability to better compete with other social enterprise players, including Oracle, Salesforce and IBM.

Yammer, which launched at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2008, raised about $142 million in venture funding before the acquisition.

Here is the full announcement from Microsoft:

Microsoft Welcomes Yammer to the Office Division

Twitter and LinkedIn have had a very public falling out.

Twitter posted earlier today about “delivering a consistent Twitter experience,” which basically meant, as as Owen Thomas at Business Insider noted, they were taking their ball and going home. The impact on LinkedIn is that tweets will no longer be displayed within LinkedIn accounts.

But LinkedIn wasted no time firing back. Perhaps you’ve also received this email in your in-box from the professional networking company:

Briefly, what the letter says is that, if you want to share status updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter … start on LinkedIn:

Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

In other words, don’t use Twitter.com (which means that users won’t view any ads or sponsored Tweets on Twitter), but spend your time on LinkedIn (which means that users will view ads there) and push your content out to that other network.

This is a very public rift that is a somewhat shocking: LinkedIn has been consuming Tweets for three years now. And as Thomas noted in his post, Twitter is punished LinkedIn for exactly the behavior the new Twitter app for Facebook works: cross-posting updates to both social networks.

Here’s the full text from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?
Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn?
Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,
The LinkedIn Team

Image credit: ShutterStock

Filed under: Entrepreneur, media, social, VentureBeat

Facebook will be joining the old guard next month with its first official earnings call, in which it will offer details on and explanations of its financial decisions over the past few months to investors and press.

The call is set for July 26, 2012, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.

We’ll be on the line, of course, to report in rabid, enthralled tones every morsel of information we can pick up.

The social networking company only went public with its shares last month. Of course, that story is one you’ve heard ad nauseum already: The disastrous first day, the angry shareholders and shocked experts.

The IPO itself was so bad that it caused at least one other tech startup to delay its own public offering, and VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney said the whole debacle proved that “Wall Street is a sucker’s game.”

However, after plummeting by 30 percent in its first two weeks of public trading, Facebook’s stock has seen a small uptick in recent weeks. As of this writing, the stock is trading at $31.09 per share.

Here’s a chart showing its performance since the IPO:

During the earnings call, we’ll likely also hear more about Facebook’s Instagram acquisition, the $1 billion deal that rocked our sleepy little Valley to its foundation, as well as the company’s ongoing plans to monetize its billion-user network, from its bespoke payments system to its all-new ad programs that bring mobile into the mix.

Filed under: social

Like so many things that go on to have big success, Yammer, the enterprise social networking company that was just officially acquired by Microsoft for a cool $1.2 billion, had an inauspicious start.

At first, actually, Yammer was not intended to be a company at all. It was built as an internal feature within a genealogy startup called Geni, to let Geni employees communicate with each other about work. Soon, though, Geni co-founder David Sacks realized that this tool they’d built could be very useful for others. And voilà, Yammer was spun out and born as its own business, with Sacks at the helm (Geni, meanwhile, is still very much around as an independent entity, its current CEO Noah Tutak told TechCrunch via email today.)

The really cool thing is that TechCrunch was on it from the very beginning. Yammer launched officially in September 2008 at TC50, the TechCrunch-backed conference that has since been replaced with our bi-annual Disrupt events. David Sacks took the stage (he introduced himself as the CEO of Geni, not Yammer) and did the first public demonstration of Yammer, positioning it as the private Twitter for intra-company communication, saying: “We’ve been using it internally for about the past six months, and we think it’s so good that we decided to spin it out into its own company, Yammer, so that other companies can use it as well.”

You can watch that first demo, and the reactions of TC50 judges including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, right here:

The first reactions to Yammer were pretty enthusiastic, and the company went on to win the TC50′s top prize that year. Erick Schonfeld was the first to report on the launch for TechCrunch, writing:

“Just like Facebook in the early days, which required a university e-mail address to join, Yammer requires a corporate email address to join.

Unlike Twitter, Yammer actually has a business model. It is free to use for employees, but if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.”

That same bottom-up “freemium” business model structure is what eventually helped to attract the acquisition interest from Microsoft, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. Yammer is “pretty unique, maybe very unique, in the viral adoption model. You can throw the word ‘enterprise’ and ‘social’ on a bunch of different stuff, but you can’t find anybody who has really built a customer base of enterprise customers in the same way virally with great respect from the IT department, with great love from the consumer,” Ballmer said in a conference call with press and analysts this morning. Post-deal, Microsoft said, that revenue model will stay intact.

We at TechCrunch have actually been both users and office neighbors of Yammer, so the relationship here has stayed pretty close — sometimes uncomfortably so. So we do have an extra bit of pride seeing Yammer’s big exit confirmed today (and Steve Ballmer’s limo parked outside), even if the price tag causes some to balk just a bit (and complain even more about Yammer’s lack of an auto-refresh feature. Grumble grumble.) But hey, you know what they say about what haters are liable to do. And it could be argued that many of those who hate on Yammer only do it because they also love it — and use it — so very much.

Anyway! Big congratulations are in order, Yammer. Don’t forget us little bloggy people now that your startup days are officially behind you.

Microsoft just announced it has indeed acquired Yammer, the four-year-old social networking company for enterprises, for $1.2 billion in cash.

The announcement confirms weeks of very credibly-sourced rumors that have been floating for weeks around the tech blogosphere (and San Francisco’s popular cafes, as first overheard by Business Insider’s Owen Thomas.) The actual price tag is exactly what had been reported by the Wall Street Journal more than a week ago. According to Microsoft, the Yammer team will be folded into its Microsoft Office division while continuing to report to Yammer’s CEO and co-founder David Sacks.

Sacks has weighed in on the deal with a post on Yammer’s corporate blog entitled “Yammer’s Next Chapter“, which reads in part:

“When Adam Pisoni and I started Yammer, we set out to do something big. When most people thought social networking was for kids, we had a vision for how it could change the way we work. Four years ago, we started paddling out to catch the wave that we’re riding today.

With the backing of Microsoft, our aim is to massively accelerate our vision to change the way work gets done with software that is built for the enterprise and loved by users.”

It’s great news for Yammer and its investors, but in many ways this begins the tough part.

Firstly, there will now be a lot of questions over how Microsoft intends to develop the service going forward. There are other new developments at Microsoft that point to an increasing focus on light, cloud-based enterprise services that have their roots in consumer popularity. In addition to Yammer, which has been likened to a private Twitter or Facebook for businesses, Microsoft recently officially completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, and has been updating its Azure cloud platform, adding new features such as Twilio integration.

The Yammer deal also puts Microsoft further into the game of developing social media services specifically for enterprises, an area where companies like Oracle, Salesforce and IBM have been actively playing, too. But it will be interesting to see how it turns this new focus on social media services into a solidly profitable part of its larger business. As it has had to do with Skype, Microsoft will now face the challenge of figuring out how to monetize Yammer. Yammer reportedly currently has 4 million registered users, but only about 20 percent of those pay for premium services; the rest get the service free. With Skype, Microsoft also has the challenge of making more money out of users who use that free calling service without charge — the vast majority of users. Last week, it started to introduce new advertising services as part of its strategy, and this may be one direction that it decides to take Yammer, too.

Here is the press release:

Microsoft Corp. and Yammer Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks, for $1.2 billion in cash. Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks.

“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”

Launched in 2008, Yammer now has more than 5 million corporate users, including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500. The service allows employees to join a secure, private social network for free and then makes it easy for companies to convert a grassroots movement into companywide strategic initiative.

Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service and maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.

“When we started Yammer four years ago, we set out to do something big,” Sacks said. “We had a vision for how social networking could change the way we work. Joining Microsoft will accelerate that vision and give us access to the technologies, expertise and resources we’ll need to scale and innovate.”

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.

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Twitter’s Expanded Tweets Now Show More Interactive Content (Mashable)
Twitter updated its “expanded tweets” feature on Wednesday, according to a post on the social networking company’s blog, allowing users to see more interactive content — such as news stories, video galleries and audio clips — inside tweets via a desktop or mobile browser. For example, when users expand a tweet containing a news article from a “growing group” of Twitter partner sites such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, users will see a headline, introduction and sometimes the Twitter accounts of the publisher and writer. CNET In addition, Twitter promises the feature will present images from TMZ and BuzzFeed, as well as video from BET, Lifetime and Dailymotion. TechCrunch In the audio realm, SoundCloud’s HTML5 widget will show up in tweets that contain a SoundCloud URL. This means that Twitter cards will display a summary of SoundCloud sounds right inside a tweet allowing anyone to follow both the SoundCloud platform and any SoundCloud content creator directly within the expanded tweet. Bloomberg Businessweek The service began rolling out to website and mobile users on Wednesday. It will be available on Twitter’s iPhone and Android apps soon. PC Magazine Twitter used an image of controversial singer and convicted felon Chris Brown to advertise the new video-viewing feature. Brown, who in 2009 was sentenced to five years probation for felony assault of his then-girlfriend and fellow pop star Rihanna, features prominently on the Twitter blog post, appearing in a screenshot of an expanded tweet that’s showing video from BET’s 106 & Park. continued…

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System-wide Facebook Integration Rumored in iOS 6 (The Verge)
According to sources, iOS 6 will include system-wide Facebook integration that’s similar to how iOS 5 deals with Twitter. That means if you opened an app like Photos, you’d be able to share something to Facebook as well as tweet, print or email it, and you’d be able to set Facebook single sign-in information from the settings. AllFacebook The social networking company continued down the path of diversifying its offerings for advertisers with an announcement Tuesday that sponsored stories in the newsfeed are now available for purchase separately via the Facebook ads application programming interface and power editor. Marketers can choose from a variety of placement options for sponsored stories. CBS News Facebook users may have seen a status update masquerading as a legally-binding privacy notice in their news feeds in the last month. The fact is that Facebook members own the intellectual property that is uploaded to the social network, but depending on their privacy and applications settings, users grant the social network “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP license).” Bloomberg Nasdaq OMX Group plans to update brokers today about the process it will use to compensate firms that lost money in the initial public offering of Facebook, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Nasdaq and Facebook ran into trouble on the morning of May 18 when computer systems used to set the opening price in the IPO were overwhelmed by order cancellations and updates. Contently/The Content Strategist More than 20 million Facebook users have been served a ton of content at McDonald’s market-leading Facebook page. Marketing strategists have been actively populating the site, engaging fans and providing fresh content. continued…

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Facebook Explores Giving Kids Access (The Wall Street Journal)
Facebook is developing technology that would allow children younger than 13 years old to use the social-networking site under parental supervision, a step that could help the company tap a new pool of users for revenue but also inflame privacy concerns. ars technica Speaking of privacy, Facebook has opened voting on changes to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which include some proposed modifications by the community as of June 1, largely a result of rallying activity by our-policy.org. In the spirit of democracy, at least 30 percent of Facebook’s user base, just over 270 million people, must participate in the vote in order for the changes to be binding in either direction. PC Magazine But Facebook is not exactly putting this information front and center on the site itself: No notifications when a user logs in, no posts to every user’s wall and nary a mention of the policy vote on Facebook’s official blog. Computerworld Facebook has released a library of C++ software components used to help run its site, the social networking company announced Saturday. By releasing this library, called Folly, Facebook will be able to release more of its internal programs as open source, because it relies on different components in this library. San Francisco Chronicle At least 13 IPOs have been withdrawn or postponed globally since Facebook began trading May 18, slowing a market for deals that’s struggled to keep momentum as stock values have failed to recover to levels before the financial crisis. There have been 192 IPOs globally since the beginning of April, putting this quarter on pace to be the slowest since 177 initial offers were completed in the three months through September 2009. continued…

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