"Lars Rasmussen, the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project, had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network, Google Wave."
Lars Rasmussen was also the guy behind google maps. Seems a little unfair to set it up like the above.
I'm very happy to see Lars Rasmussen releasing something new again. He's the (ex-Googler) guy behind Google Maps and the much loved (and perhaps also hated) Google Wave project. Google wave was (in my mind) one of those "ahead of it's time" projects when it was released. I'm not aware of any significant contributions he has had since his time in Facebook. So is this his first?
Has anyone seen a work social network that wasn't a joke? We have one, and the only use is that your director/VP asks their org to follow them, and then posts various strategic stuff they want you to see. There's zero peer-to-peer usage at all.
Isn't Facebook already Facebook for Work? I'm sanitizing my internet presence for employment reasons and their moderation kills anything approaching NSWF so facebook can be wide open on work desktops.
They're not naming any of their hot new collaboration tools, so they're just ripping off google docs then?
I wonder what guarantees on data confidentiality will be offered? Facebook doesn't have a good reputation when it comes to privacy. I do not believe any serious workplace will trust them with handling any company data and IP.
Whoa, it had been so long since I saw a social network pivot into the business space that I'd forgotten how desperate and overused a strategy that had become
It's 2008 all over again, when freemium enterprise social networking was still hot.
I wonder if they might put it on a subdomain. Facebook is blocked at my company. That might make using Facebook@Work a little harder.
And here comes highly personalized B2B advertising. Smart move, if you ask me. Wonder why they limit themselves to relatively large sized companies.
So for those of us who don't have a Facebook account and refuse to create one, this means our employer can force us to sign up?
Sounds like tibbr, which works okay. My employer is pushing yammer as a replacement, but as others have said, adoption is spotty. Bunch of senior managers with time on their hands thr post popular platitudes and feel good nonsense. Not very much information sharing goes on.
Yammer was twitter for work. Facebook rolled out its own version before anyone else does. But thats pretty much it. The very fact of facebook having an addiction component will work against it.
I think managers would think twice before introducing a collaborating software where team would end up spending more time than actual work. I think for this very reason softwares like work wikis, sharepoint are so successful.
Also from user point of view, I do not see myself using the same tool at work and then at home. Hopefully they have a radically different UI rather than just changing the logo with companies logo.
"Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time." Wow, that's really different from what I expected.
I couldn't work out from the article if you could run Facebook on your own servers or not. This will be a massive hurdle to jump if they really want to sell to enterprise.
Honestly, I don't see anything here that will make them competitive with offerings like Jive Software, currently being used by the majority of Fortune 500s and more SV companies than you'd think.
I wonder what it would take to get a passable OSS substitute to Facebook going in this space. You could host it on your own server(s) the same way you can host your own internal wiki that looks/feels just like Wikipedia. Why don't we have this already?
It took them 8 years to figure out there's a market in Enterprise? I hope they make it easy to convert from private FB Groups to 'Work' accounts because any company I know who would use FB for work is already doing so using that option.
This is going to destroy Slack
I think this could be a Good Thing for many firms, but let me add that some firms will want something more customizable, and with better support for integration with their other apps, content, events, etc. For the firms that want something that's:
a. built by a company with an enterprise focus as it's core
and
b. built with integration with your other enterprise applications as a core principle
c. is open source
Then I have another option for you.
http://fogbeam.com/products.html
*still not using Facebook
If you're running a business and you want an internal social network then you're far better off installing redmatrix.
https://github.com/friendica/red
It's easy to deploy and you can do things such as end to end encryption, and there are many sharing/privacy options.
If you install some version of Facebook then chances are they'll try to find some way to exfiltrate or monetise your company data. Also, if you're not a US company then 100% of everything you enter into Facebook is regarded as fair game to be exfiltrated, stored, analysed, etc. Probably that's not in your best interests.
Not sure why one would need a work specific social network. Work != social, at least for me. I've never shared anything or wanted to on my fb with my work colleagues.
I think they should change the name. "Facebook at Work" has gotten many people fired. It might reduce friction to adoption, but maybe that's not the goal.
I feel bad for Yammer.
It might work because of Facebooks scale but it's not like there aren't a million other FB like enterprise social networks out there.
I know it's not really a competitor, but I would love to see Facebook (or anyone else) eat LinkedIn's lunch.
So sick of their awful practices.
If it is not on-premise and completely shut from the outside, it does not exist as a product.
What else could it be used for? Publishing news?
They have tried this before and failed,they will fail once more.
Even if they had something to offer, in the senior managers mind Facebook ≠productivity.
What a waste of effort!
Facebook is no where near being a true technology company like Google. So facebook copied MySpace and is now copying LinkedIn. Neat.
> By making this free, Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network
Who would use "Facebook for work" that isn't already using "Facebook"?
Awesome, pretty soon companies wont have to store any of "their" data on their own servers.
Facebook - Company info/announcements/chat
OneDrive/Google/Dropbox - Company documents
VOIP Services - Company communications
All stored in clear-text obviously (or at least not encrypted by company using the service before transfer to said services, same thing really).
I myself think this trend is hilariously ridiculous, but I'm in a shrinking minority I assume.