Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, is launching the next-gen version of its platform today. Aiming to be a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, Yammer 2.0 is being released today at TechCrunch Disrupt. As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer is adding a number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform. These new applications include polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And 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. Similar in theory to the Google Apps marketplace, Yammer is giving third-party developers the ability to sell and create applications like those that Yammer will now offer. For example, a Crocodoc app will allow you to highlight and comment on PDFs, Word documents, images and other files that are attached to Yammer messages. And new Zendesk app will allow users to attach a Zendesk customer service ticket to a Yammer message. The company says Box, Expensify and Lithium Yammer apps are currently in development. Yammer, which we use internally at TechCrunch, is gaining steady traction in a space thats crowded with competitors like Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, CubeTree and others. Yammer is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (that includes 80% of the Fortune 500). And the startup is doubling revenue every quarter. Sacks believes that this product is going to grow the communications platform by leaps and bounds. While some have shied away from affiliating their collaboration platforms as actual social network, Sacks says the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. And interestingly, Yammer 2.0 looks and feels a lot like a Facebook for businesses. And that’s not a bad thing—the new platform is extremely easy to use. 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8Authors: Leena Rao