People love Twitter, and the micro-blogging service has proved its value many times over -- yet Twitter's performance has been frustratingly unreliable. Thus it didn't take Nostradamus to write this in May: "Other vendors, and even purpose-built enterprise systems, could fill the gap if [Twitter's parent company] Obvious doesn't get its act together."

Now just such a rival has emerged, and in a very high-profile way: Yammer, a Twitter-like service for the enterprise, won first prize at the TechCrunch 50 conference.

TechCrunch:

Yammer is Twitter with a business model...Yammer takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications. There is such a huge demand for this type of service that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the first day it launched on Monday. Anyone with a corporate email can sign up and follow other people in their company. But if a company wants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay.

Rafe Needleman says companies may still choose to build their own micro-messaging services: "[T]his kind of product is too easy to build (especially on a workgroup scale, as compared to the consumer scale Twitter has struggled with)."