Pity

Yammer is Twitter for your company. It's a discussion board where you can post messages to your colleagues. There is an official desktop application available (in AIR) and the great native Mac OS X application Gabble by Erik Hinterbichler.

Pity for Yammer

Pity is a tiny application that lives in your menubar. Every 70 seconds it asks Yammer for new messages in your network. The little icon in the menubar will change to show there is something new to read. You can now open the Yammer website from the application menu. Call it a Yammer notification thingy if you like.

Why?

For fun? I'm easily distracted and the Yammer stream at work is full with interesting discussions... and almost all remarks are off-topic. While it's fun to read I don't need or want pop-up messages every 5 minutes. I hope Pity is discrete enough to show there is something to go to without taking my attention away from the task at hand.

Privacy

I like my privacy. Pity uses OAuth to authenticate with Yammer and everything goes over SSL. This is an expensive way to say Pity (or I, the developer) never ever sees your Yammer password and that you can choose to block all access from Pity via the Yammer website if you like. Pity only stores your full name (if you told Yammer) and the number of the last read message. These are stored on your hard drive and nowhere else. Pity is open source, so check the source code and don't take my word for it.

About the name

Why is it called ‘Pity’? Well, Yammer sounds a lot like the Dutch word ‘jammer’ which translated into English means, yes, ‘pity’. It also happens to be a short name for a small application.