The Year Round Christmas Letter

The Christmas letter is one of those things that people make fun of, but yet secretly enjoy reading when received. While I still receive 1 or 2 each year, in today's highly connected world they seem very old-fashioned.

In today's world keeping up with family and friends is so much easier, but yet figuring out the right way to do this and keeping up with all of the ways folks are communicating can be downright difficult.

My family has settled on using Yammer to create a "private" area to communicate with each other using a simple user interface that is available on multiple platforms including web, desktop, SMS and multiple smartphones including the Blackberry. Yammer is similar to Twitter in that is a giant flow of updates from all participants, but is much more private because it is restricted to users on the same mail domain. It is also much easier to use because it is not limited to the 140 character limit of Twitter.

The tricky part with using Yammer in this way is to get email addresses on the same domain. In the corporate and SMB world having a single mail domain is the norm, but with family and or friends this is normally not the case. The way I have handled this is to create forwarding mail accounts on one of my mail domains. I simply create an account on my domain that forwards to the users own normal mail account. In this setup they receive the Yammer invite and verification in their own mailbox and only have to remember the Yammer ID I have created for them to sign-on to Yammer.

This allows you to create a nice walled-in environment to share who is doing what, when and how. We have three generations of family members using Yammer to communicate on the daily comings and goings of our worlds.

I would also suggest you install the YammerFox add-in to notify users when updates are made to their Yammer site.

I have also looked at Facebook's group function and found its functionality to be well behind Yammer's for purposes of sharing family info, but when extending your communication circle beyond the family to your friends Facebook seems to be the best way to make this work. In general as the communication circle moves from family to friends the details of sharing is low enough to work with Facebook's more open privacy model.

My family now communicates so much via Yammer that my weekly call to my parents centers around the week's Yammer updates vs. spending time learning what has happened since we last talked.

As my family works on extending this communication model to our friends via Facebook, the need for the year end Christmas letter will just fade into history.