By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

Yammer has inspired a quasi-imitator in WizeHive (blog), sez TechCrunch.

TC2009 as an invitation code may yet work if you sign up for WizeHive right now. TechCrunch is giving away 500 WizeHive invites.

What is WizeHive?

WizeHive is a tech startup that offers businesses the ability to set up internal communications using Twitter-like features, aiming to make it as simple as possible for workers to talk to each other and organize their projects.

Where’s the money?

WizeHive has $100,000 in bootstrapper funding from its co-founders, Mike Carson and Michael Levinson. Surely they must see potential in it, because that’s serious money to pull out of pocket in this troubled economic era.

What can you do with WizeHive? What makes it special?

We’ll see if WizeHive emerges as a worthy competitor to Twitter, Yammer and other micropublishing tools. But what it’s got going for it at the moment is its combination of easy-to-use threaded messaging, task management, file sharing and database collaboration.

All hail the online office, right?

What’s the revenue model?

This is always one of my favorite questions to ask about a new startup. While some companies like Twitter manage through incredible viral growth (and ample funding) to get away with waiting for the user base to dictate by its behavior what kind of revenue streams would work best, bootstrapped outfits like WizeHive have to start with fees in place.

You can have up to three people from your company or group use WizeHive for free, but they’ll only give you 50 MB maximum storage. After that, it’s $8 a month and up for more storage.

Do you love or hate WizeHive?