I haven't done a thorough comparison of Yammer to Socialcast, but I know we tried Yammer first and didn't really like it. Perhaps someone else can chip in w/ a better comparison, but here are a few of the main things I love about Socialcast:
– The have a really great attention to detail in their UI
– You have lots of options for clients (web, desktop, iphone)
– Their API rocks

Sure, in PHP it looks like this. It's just a simple REST call:

function post_to_socialcast($message, $url = false) {
$socialcast_url = "https://SHORTCODE.socialcast.com/api/messages.json";
$message = "message[title]=".$message;
// link this message?
$message .= ($url) ? "&message[url]=".$url : "";

// curl options
$options[CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER] = 0; // important
$options[CURLOPT_USERPWD] = "EMAIL:PASSWORD";
$options[CURLOPT_POST] = 1;
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = $message;

single_curl($socialcast_url, false, $options);
}

Obviously you need to replace SHORTCODE, EMAIL and PASSWORD with your own values. This code uses my curl library that you can find at: https://joshfraz.wpcomstaging.com/2009/01/26/how-to-use…

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me if you need more.

There's not much for me to show, but API is super simple. I got our integration up and running in less than 10 minutes. I recommend you just dive in and try it out.