6 ms·

Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

151 points by darklrd 12y ago

ThomPete 12y ago
"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.
- spinchange 12y ago
  It definitely should be noted, simply because Maps is such a huge success and professional achievement. On the other hand, this is relevant framing in the sense that he's probably learned a lot from Wave and will apply those lessons here.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    It is relevant but could include maps as his other accomplishment to not brand him as a guy who potentially goes from failure to failure. He is a big deal behind one of the biggest digital innovations of all time IMHO.
- epmatsw 12y ago
  Was Wave even a social network? I vaguely remember it being more like a real-time Google Docs before Google Docs went realtime.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    The original vision was "email replacement".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    Funny, I remember Docs being realtime at the same time as Wave was around. The problem with Wave was nobody knew what it was.
ckluis 12y ago
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.
- jcfrei 12y ago
  Maybe that's the point. They noticed declining traffic during work hours and try to reestablish their access to bored employees at work by essentially forcing IT admins to unblock the facebook domain.
  - patrickk 12y ago
    Perhaps its simply to get a different revenue stream other than ads. Very vulnerable to adblockers.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. This will give them an in. They can pretend to sell collaboration tools while they sneak analytics with interesting stuff on the users' personal facebook usage (and maybe browsing habits) in along with it. This won't come immediately, of course.
    - dcsommer 12y ago
      > I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. Why do you think that? User data is the crown jewel and competitive advantage Facebook has over other companies. It would never give up that advantage. This meme refuses to die somehow.
      - crdoconnor 12y ago
        Selling it does not necessarily mean giving up that advantage.
smackfu 12y ago
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.
- mpeg 12y ago
  Chatter got some use as a proper work social network when I was at Salesforce, currently at another company that also uses chatter and it's exactly as you mention, a barren land with the occasional person tooting their own horn "@VP @CEO @Mom"
  - dave5104 12y ago
    We use Chatter where I work, and I think it's used pretty successfully. It's not exactly a "social network" because, let's face it, when you're at work, you're (hopefully) going to be a lot more professional and not treat it like Facebook. Instead, I'm seeing our sales team communicating with the product team to ask questions about our products, post suggestions they've received from clients, ask for example clients, etc. It seems to work. It just doesn't work like Facebook because, well, it's a completely different environment.
    - mpeg 12y ago
      No, I know, but I think I'd be much happier using something like slack. I can always then connect it to Salesforce and any other third party systems via Zapier.
- eldude 12y ago
  Jive Software is used successfully by the majority of Fortune 500s.
- MadManE 12y ago
  I think this is because of the inherent inequality that exists at work. In a typical social network, everyone is essentially "equal" when it comes to who you know and interact with. At work, you necessarily are very closely involved with people who hold significant authority over you. Because of this, you have to act incredibly more guarded at work and on its related networks.
binarymax 12y ago
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.
- antsar 12y ago
  The same way that no serious workplace trusts Google/Dropbox with handling any company data and IP today, right?
  - cdnsteve 12y ago
    I wouldn't assume so. FB has a reputation for being more forward with users data as being public and privacy not being so hot.
  - lern_too_spel 12y ago
    Presumably, he's referring to SSAE-16 auditing, like for Google's products. The problem of auditing suppliers of parts and services is decades old and effectively already solved.
- VLM 12y ago
  There's raw data, and then there's confidential data. My suspicion is you could swap most mgmt announcements from any company with any other company and the employees would never tell the difference. "Customer service is very important to us here at innitech" "Here's our diversity statement, please click like" "This friday is officially jeans day" Or weird trivialities like a dozen people asking me if I've fixed my TPS report headers yet, or the office printer is reporting "PC Load Letter" and no one can remember the new IT ticketing system procedure so I'm posting it here instead. I don't think it would be the communications platform of choice for top secret R+D or contract negotiations.
- hamburglar 12y ago
  Just think how convenient it'll be when Facebook CorpDev wants to approach your company. They won't even need to ask any questions!
forgottenpass 12y ago
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?
- vertex-four 12y ago
  In this case, it's a walled-off Facebook about work. You can use all Facebook's tools to communicate with your coworkers about things you're doing at work, without making it public.
  - VLM 12y ago
    That happens already, with share to group which happens to contain friendly coworkers. Only difference is linking it to corporate active directory such that we won't be able to share to "work friends" group but will have to share to the whole department. Probably lower overall use, possibly because of negative gossip but also self censorship in that I know the work office cooler club or whatever all talk about minecraft, but I'd think twice about having to spam that to the entire department not just the people who are into it.
- ihsw 12y ago
  Google Docs doesn't have the much-vaunted "stream." Going to docs.google.com simply brings up, well, docs.
  - Navarr 12y ago
    Google+ does though.. but I guess that really only applies to Google Apps accounts http://i.imgur.com/53t8rKS.png http://i.imgur.com/53t8rKS.png
diverightin63 12y ago
I feel bad for Yammer.
- gtCameron 12y ago
  If it makes you feel any better for them they sold for 1.2 billion to Microsoft in 2012
  - diverightin63 12y ago
    Ah, what a relief.
- glitchinc 12y ago
  My first thought was, "So Facebook released Yammer?" But after some thought... It will be interesting to see how this will be differentiated from Yammer. Yammer may actually benefit from this ... companies that are considering workplace social networks may evaluate all options, and then realize that Yammer has been out for quite some time and touts over 200,000 corporate customers. Many companies have Facebook restrictions in place, and I don't see that trend reversing due to this announcement. Yammer, separate and distinct from Facebook, may see a bump due to more companies "being interested" in work place social networks.
  - pwelch 12y ago
    Agreed. I've used Yammer before and it's pretty decent. If I was a company looking to use a "Social Network for Work" I would prefer a separate product like Yammer instead of Facebook.
  - tomschlick 12y ago
    I could see FB creating a "whitelistable" domain where you can only access @Work stuff so that enterprises would be happier to use FB@Work. Something like work.facebook.com
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
xedarius 12y ago
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.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  I see them targeting the market of businesses too small to run their own communication infrastructure. The people using google docs and hangouts because it's already there. Or Office 365 because they can't/don't want to host internally. Why would anyone already running their own communication want internal Facebook? Because email lists aren't hip enough?
  - iancarroll 12y ago
    This initially targets companies with >100 employees, so there has to be some existing infrastructure. Facebook has a great UI and there are many advantages.
  - rblatz 12y ago
    I don't see it as an email replacement. I see it as truer to it's name. A Facebook for your company. Let's say you are going to do some work with Molly from the Customer Support department. You don't really know much about her, so you bring her up on the company Facebook, and you find out that you both went to the same university around the same time. You also find out that she has experience in testing. You also see a picture of her, so that you don't have to go walking around customer service area of the office asking if anyone knows where Molly is until she finally overhears you and introduces herself. Is any of this stuff hard to set up internally? Not really, but someone has to prioritize it, sort through existing options and pick one, or develop it in house, there needs to be support, and maintenance. All barriers to implementing something that can help foster a more open and collaborative culture.
hosay123 12y ago
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
ThomPete 12y ago
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.
biomimic 12y ago
Facebook is no where near being a true technology company like Google. So facebook copied MySpace and is now copying LinkedIn. Neat.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  If you actually read the article you'd see that there is practically no overlap with LinkedIn whatsoever.
- mason240 12y ago
  This seems much closer to sharepoint.
- jbverschoor 12y ago
  facebook got big when they copied twitter
  - biomimic 12y ago
    They also got big when they started scouring peoples inboxes for contacts, one of the largest security breaches in Net history.
jongos 12y ago
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.
debacle 12y ago
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.
kyllo 12y ago
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?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Can you not do that with Diaspora?
  - kyllo 12y ago
    Maybe you can. I guess I should look into that. Perhaps Friendica as well.
- ComNik 12y ago
  Would you pay for that? In something like a GitHub Enterprise setting, closed source but self-hosted? Something like FB-Groups for organizations of all kind fell out as a byproduct of our startup and we are toying with the idea of trying to sell that part in isolation. Basically you get your own, hosted / self-hosted FB-Groups, plus a bit more flexibility regarding permissions and group management. For example you could introduce someone external into a sub-topic in one of your groups, without exposing him to the rest of the group (not sure if that is possible with FB groups). [Edit: Grammar]
  - kyllo 12y ago
    I think that would be basically competing with Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Is/was Wave in this space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave
applecore 12y ago
It's 2008 all over again, when freemium enterprise social networking was still hot.
eldude 12y ago
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. https://www.jivesoftware.com https://www.jivesoftware.com
- einrealist 12y ago
  Most important: I can run Jive in my own IT environment. At least I can defend myself from espionage.
jcrei 12y ago
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?
- cwilson 12y ago
  I was one of those people who loved Wave and used it constantly. I was so sad to see it get shut down. Very happy to see Lars doing something new!
- taoquay 12y ago
  This isn't the first product he's been involved with at Facebook. He also shipped Graph Search last year. http://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-search-facebooks-weapon-to-challenge-google/all/ http://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-searc...
- TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  And Wave was a rehash of Ray Ozzie's Groove, which got bought by Microsoft when they hired him, and then they shelved it. This was c. '97, so how much more was Ozzie ahead of his time, and when is it going to be BE time for this? I still want it. I think the problem with Groove was that it stored data on your local machine, and replicated between clients, and the big companies aren't interested. Best I can figure is that they want all that data on their servers so that they can examine what's in it and how it's being used.
  - frik 12y ago
    Microsoft bought Groove in 2005 and renamed the client to Sharepoint Workspace 2010. It was not that great and it got canned. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove
    - TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
howeyc 12y ago
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.
- rondon2 12y ago
  It is just so expensive to provide 99% uptime on your own servers. Who is going to go into the office at 2:00AM when an executive can't access his power point presentation?
  - xorcist 12y ago
    That comparison doesn't make sense. Google's SREs doesn't get out of bed just because you can't access your powerpoint either.
    - rondon2 12y ago
      That is because Google has technicians 24/7/365 at their data centers.
- koyote 12y ago
  While I agree I believe that for now this is mostly the case for US-based companies. Working in the finance sector, it's interesting to see a strong divide between US companies that are more than happy to have an external company hold all/most of their data in the cloud and European and Asian financial institutions who insist on hosting everything on site using their IT department, their software and hardware etc.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - elarkin 12y ago
vishalzone2002 12y ago
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.
- ssharp 12y ago
  We use Yammer at our company and it's much more like Facebook than Twitter. It's not the be-all and end-all of our collaboration tech nor do I think people spend more time on it than actual work.
- bduerst 12y ago
  Yammer _is_ Facebook for work, which is why I'm surprised that FB is releasing this product now, and that they expect much of a marketshare.
yuvadam 12y ago
> 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"?
- smackfu 12y ago
  You can be mandated to use it for work.
pearjuice 12y ago
And here comes highly personalized B2B advertising. Smart move, if you ask me. Wonder why they limit themselves to relatively large sized companies.
arthurcolle 12y ago
This is going to destroy Slack
- erythrocyte 12y ago
  No, this is going to destroy Facebook. Picture it this way: 1. You show up to work, and Facebook is now mandatory. It's attached to your real name, and Facebook helpfully connects your real profile to all your co-workers. 2. You now have to delete ALL of your non-work contacts, for fear of gossip contamination, and NEVER use Facebook outside of work again. 3. Everyone who has Facebook at work, now needs something to fill the gaping void of recreational social media. 4. A new upstart fills the void, and Facebook crumbles and implodes.
  - gnopgnip 12y ago
    This is a separate account from your existing Facebook account.
- subpixel 12y ago
  I disagree. This is great for Slack. They already have a product that people love, and of course this will raise their profile immeasurably, as people hear about FB's play and look into the available options. Additionally, Slack now has just about the best tagline in the world: 'We're not Facebook'.
- suttree 12y ago
  Maybe not, but it might eat into a lot of document/collaboration platforms.
- Synergyse 12y ago
  Disagree 100% - have you used Slack?
- m52go 12y ago
  If I were leading Slack, I'd be ecstatic. This move by Facebook is validating. Also, I'm sure they'll produce lots of insights and make lots of mistakes I can learn from...on their dime.
jkaptur 12y ago
"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.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  What could possibly go wrong!
spydum 12y ago
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.
motters 12y ago
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 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.
aestetix 12y ago
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?
- bitsweet 12y ago
  > Employers can create separate log-ins for employees to use with their Work accounts, or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place. Doesn't look like you have to have personal account or link it.
- reledi 12y ago
  That's up to you and your employer. Edit: Worth pointing out that it's not really a Facebook account in the typical sense. You can have an FB@Work account without having an FB account, though it seems you can also use your FB account for both.
kolev 12y ago
What a waste of effort!
ohnoesmyscv 12y ago
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.
- rblatz 12y ago
  We were just talking about doing a work only social network, with basic bio info, a photo, and background. We have been growing rapidly and it's getting extremely hard to keep everyone's info straight. I know that it's going to be useful for me since I end up working across departments fairly often. Do I expect everyone to get value from it? No. Will it make the workplace magically better? No. But it will give us the tools to be a little closer as a company, and hopefully promote cross team communication.
scott_karana 12y ago
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.
- suttree 12y ago
  Working on it - www.somewhere.com - but they have a huge lead. As a networking tool that nobody likes but everybody uses, that's quite some lunch :~/
einrealist 12y ago
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?
user3141592653 12y ago
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.
mindcrime 12y ago
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 http://fogbeam.com/products.html http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy
_pb 12y ago
*still not using Facebook

151 points by darklrd 12y ago

"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.

spinchange 12y ago
It definitely should be noted, simply because Maps is such a huge success and professional achievement. On the other hand, this is relevant framing in the sense that he's probably learned a lot from Wave and will apply those lessons here.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  It is relevant but could include maps as his other accomplishment to not brand him as a guy who potentially goes from failure to failure. He is a big deal behind one of the biggest digital innovations of all time IMHO.
epmatsw 12y ago
Was Wave even a social network? I vaguely remember it being more like a real-time Google Docs before Google Docs went realtime.
- saraid216 12y ago
  The original vision was "email replacement".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Funny, I remember Docs being realtime at the same time as Wave was around. The problem with Wave was nobody knew what it was.

ckluis 12y ago

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.

jcfrei 12y ago
Maybe that's the point. They noticed declining traffic during work hours and try to reestablish their access to bored employees at work by essentially forcing IT admins to unblock the facebook domain.
- patrickk 12y ago
  Perhaps its simply to get a different revenue stream other than ads. Very vulnerable to adblockers.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. This will give them an in. They can pretend to sell collaboration tools while they sneak analytics with interesting stuff on the users' personal facebook usage (and maybe browsing habits) in along with it. This won't come immediately, of course.
  - dcsommer 12y ago
    > I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. Why do you think that? User data is the crown jewel and competitive advantage Facebook has over other companies. It would never give up that advantage. This meme refuses to die somehow.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      Selling it does not necessarily mean giving up that advantage.

smackfu 12y ago

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.

mpeg 12y ago
Chatter got some use as a proper work social network when I was at Salesforce, currently at another company that also uses chatter and it's exactly as you mention, a barren land with the occasional person tooting their own horn "@VP @CEO @Mom"
- dave5104 12y ago
  We use Chatter where I work, and I think it's used pretty successfully. It's not exactly a "social network" because, let's face it, when you're at work, you're (hopefully) going to be a lot more professional and not treat it like Facebook. Instead, I'm seeing our sales team communicating with the product team to ask questions about our products, post suggestions they've received from clients, ask for example clients, etc. It seems to work. It just doesn't work like Facebook because, well, it's a completely different environment.
  - mpeg 12y ago
    No, I know, but I think I'd be much happier using something like slack. I can always then connect it to Salesforce and any other third party systems via Zapier.
eldude 12y ago
Jive Software is used successfully by the majority of Fortune 500s.
MadManE 12y ago
I think this is because of the inherent inequality that exists at work. In a typical social network, everyone is essentially "equal" when it comes to who you know and interact with. At work, you necessarily are very closely involved with people who hold significant authority over you. Because of this, you have to act incredibly more guarded at work and on its related networks.

binarymax 12y ago

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.

antsar 12y ago
The same way that no serious workplace trusts Google/Dropbox with handling any company data and IP today, right?
- cdnsteve 12y ago
  I wouldn't assume so. FB has a reputation for being more forward with users data as being public and privacy not being so hot.
- lern_too_spel 12y ago
  Presumably, he's referring to SSAE-16 auditing, like for Google's products. The problem of auditing suppliers of parts and services is decades old and effectively already solved.
VLM 12y ago
There's raw data, and then there's confidential data. My suspicion is you could swap most mgmt announcements from any company with any other company and the employees would never tell the difference. "Customer service is very important to us here at innitech" "Here's our diversity statement, please click like" "This friday is officially jeans day" Or weird trivialities like a dozen people asking me if I've fixed my TPS report headers yet, or the office printer is reporting "PC Load Letter" and no one can remember the new IT ticketing system procedure so I'm posting it here instead. I don't think it would be the communications platform of choice for top secret R+D or contract negotiations.
hamburglar 12y ago
Just think how convenient it'll be when Facebook CorpDev wants to approach your company. They won't even need to ask any questions!

forgottenpass 12y ago

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?

vertex-four 12y ago
In this case, it's a walled-off Facebook about work. You can use all Facebook's tools to communicate with your coworkers about things you're doing at work, without making it public.
- VLM 12y ago
  That happens already, with share to group which happens to contain friendly coworkers. Only difference is linking it to corporate active directory such that we won't be able to share to "work friends" group but will have to share to the whole department. Probably lower overall use, possibly because of negative gossip but also self censorship in that I know the work office cooler club or whatever all talk about minecraft, but I'd think twice about having to spam that to the entire department not just the people who are into it.
ihsw 12y ago
Google Docs doesn't have the much-vaunted "stream." Going to docs.google.com simply brings up, well, docs.
- Navarr 12y ago
  Google+ does though.. but I guess that really only applies to Google Apps accounts http://i.imgur.com/53t8rKS.png http://i.imgur.com/53t8rKS.png

diverightin63 12y ago

I feel bad for Yammer.

gtCameron 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better for them they sold for 1.2 billion to Microsoft in 2012
- diverightin63 12y ago
  Ah, what a relief.
glitchinc 12y ago
My first thought was, "So Facebook released Yammer?" But after some thought... It will be interesting to see how this will be differentiated from Yammer. Yammer may actually benefit from this ... companies that are considering workplace social networks may evaluate all options, and then realize that Yammer has been out for quite some time and touts over 200,000 corporate customers. Many companies have Facebook restrictions in place, and I don't see that trend reversing due to this announcement. Yammer, separate and distinct from Facebook, may see a bump due to more companies "being interested" in work place social networks.
- pwelch 12y ago
  Agreed. I've used Yammer before and it's pretty decent. If I was a company looking to use a "Social Network for Work" I would prefer a separate product like Yammer instead of Facebook.
- tomschlick 12y ago
  I could see FB creating a "whitelistable" domain where you can only access @Work stuff so that enterprises would be happier to use FB@Work. Something like work.facebook.com
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

xedarius 12y ago

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.

forgottenpass 12y ago
I see them targeting the market of businesses too small to run their own communication infrastructure. The people using google docs and hangouts because it's already there. Or Office 365 because they can't/don't want to host internally. Why would anyone already running their own communication want internal Facebook? Because email lists aren't hip enough?
- iancarroll 12y ago
  This initially targets companies with >100 employees, so there has to be some existing infrastructure. Facebook has a great UI and there are many advantages.
- rblatz 12y ago
  I don't see it as an email replacement. I see it as truer to it's name. A Facebook for your company. Let's say you are going to do some work with Molly from the Customer Support department. You don't really know much about her, so you bring her up on the company Facebook, and you find out that you both went to the same university around the same time. You also find out that she has experience in testing. You also see a picture of her, so that you don't have to go walking around customer service area of the office asking if anyone knows where Molly is until she finally overhears you and introduces herself. Is any of this stuff hard to set up internally? Not really, but someone has to prioritize it, sort through existing options and pick one, or develop it in house, there needs to be support, and maintenance. All barriers to implementing something that can help foster a more open and collaborative culture.

hosay123 12y ago

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

ThomPete 12y ago

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.

biomimic 12y ago

Facebook is no where near being a true technology company like Google. So facebook copied MySpace and is now copying LinkedIn. Neat.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
If you actually read the article you'd see that there is practically no overlap with LinkedIn whatsoever.
mason240 12y ago
This seems much closer to sharepoint.
jbverschoor 12y ago
facebook got big when they copied twitter
- biomimic 12y ago
  They also got big when they started scouring peoples inboxes for contacts, one of the largest security breaches in Net history.

jongos 12y ago

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.

debacle 12y ago

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.

kyllo 12y ago

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?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
Can you not do that with Diaspora?
- kyllo 12y ago
  Maybe you can. I guess I should look into that. Perhaps Friendica as well.
ComNik 12y ago
Would you pay for that? In something like a GitHub Enterprise setting, closed source but self-hosted? Something like FB-Groups for organizations of all kind fell out as a byproduct of our startup and we are toying with the idea of trying to sell that part in isolation. Basically you get your own, hosted / self-hosted FB-Groups, plus a bit more flexibility regarding permissions and group management. For example you could introduce someone external into a sub-topic in one of your groups, without exposing him to the rest of the group (not sure if that is possible with FB groups). [Edit: Grammar]
- kyllo 12y ago
  I think that would be basically competing with Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Is/was Wave in this space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

applecore 12y ago

It's 2008 all over again, when freemium enterprise social networking was still hot.

eldude 12y ago

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. https://www.jivesoftware.com https://www.jivesoftware.com

einrealist 12y ago
Most important: I can run Jive in my own IT environment. At least I can defend myself from espionage.

jcrei 12y ago

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?

cwilson 12y ago
I was one of those people who loved Wave and used it constantly. I was so sad to see it get shut down. Very happy to see Lars doing something new!
taoquay 12y ago
This isn't the first product he's been involved with at Facebook. He also shipped Graph Search last year. http://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-search-facebooks-weapon-to-challenge-google/all/ http://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-searc...
TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
And Wave was a rehash of Ray Ozzie's Groove, which got bought by Microsoft when they hired him, and then they shelved it. This was c. '97, so how much more was Ozzie ahead of his time, and when is it going to be BE time for this? I still want it. I think the problem with Groove was that it stored data on your local machine, and replicated between clients, and the big companies aren't interested. Best I can figure is that they want all that data on their servers so that they can examine what's in it and how it's being used.
- frik 12y ago
  Microsoft bought Groove in 2005 and renamed the client to Sharepoint Workspace 2010. It was not that great and it got canned. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove
  - TheRealDunkirk 12y ago

howeyc 12y ago

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.

rondon2 12y ago
It is just so expensive to provide 99% uptime on your own servers. Who is going to go into the office at 2:00AM when an executive can't access his power point presentation?
- xorcist 12y ago
  That comparison doesn't make sense. Google's SREs doesn't get out of bed just because you can't access your powerpoint either.
  - rondon2 12y ago
    That is because Google has technicians 24/7/365 at their data centers.
koyote 12y ago
While I agree I believe that for now this is mostly the case for US-based companies. Working in the finance sector, it's interesting to see a strong divide between US companies that are more than happy to have an external company hold all/most of their data in the cloud and European and Asian financial institutions who insist on hosting everything on site using their IT department, their software and hardware etc.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- elarkin 12y ago

vishalzone2002 12y ago

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.

ssharp 12y ago
We use Yammer at our company and it's much more like Facebook than Twitter. It's not the be-all and end-all of our collaboration tech nor do I think people spend more time on it than actual work.
bduerst 12y ago
Yammer _is_ Facebook for work, which is why I'm surprised that FB is releasing this product now, and that they expect much of a marketshare.

yuvadam 12y ago

> 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"?

smackfu 12y ago
You can be mandated to use it for work.

pearjuice 12y ago

And here comes highly personalized B2B advertising. Smart move, if you ask me. Wonder why they limit themselves to relatively large sized companies.

arthurcolle 12y ago

This is going to destroy Slack

erythrocyte 12y ago
No, this is going to destroy Facebook. Picture it this way: 1. You show up to work, and Facebook is now mandatory. It's attached to your real name, and Facebook helpfully connects your real profile to all your co-workers. 2. You now have to delete ALL of your non-work contacts, for fear of gossip contamination, and NEVER use Facebook outside of work again. 3. Everyone who has Facebook at work, now needs something to fill the gaping void of recreational social media. 4. A new upstart fills the void, and Facebook crumbles and implodes.
- gnopgnip 12y ago
  This is a separate account from your existing Facebook account.
subpixel 12y ago
I disagree. This is great for Slack. They already have a product that people love, and of course this will raise their profile immeasurably, as people hear about FB's play and look into the available options. Additionally, Slack now has just about the best tagline in the world: 'We're not Facebook'.
suttree 12y ago
Maybe not, but it might eat into a lot of document/collaboration platforms.
Synergyse 12y ago
Disagree 100% - have you used Slack?
m52go 12y ago
If I were leading Slack, I'd be ecstatic. This move by Facebook is validating. Also, I'm sure they'll produce lots of insights and make lots of mistakes I can learn from...on their dime.

jkaptur 12y ago

"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.

spacemanmatt 12y ago
What could possibly go wrong!

spydum 12y ago

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.

motters 12y ago

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 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.

aestetix 12y ago

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?

bitsweet 12y ago
> Employers can create separate log-ins for employees to use with their Work accounts, or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place. Doesn't look like you have to have personal account or link it.
reledi 12y ago
That's up to you and your employer. Edit: Worth pointing out that it's not really a Facebook account in the typical sense. You can have an FB@Work account without having an FB account, though it seems you can also use your FB account for both.

kolev 12y ago

What a waste of effort!

ohnoesmyscv 12y ago

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.

rblatz 12y ago
We were just talking about doing a work only social network, with basic bio info, a photo, and background. We have been growing rapidly and it's getting extremely hard to keep everyone's info straight. I know that it's going to be useful for me since I end up working across departments fairly often. Do I expect everyone to get value from it? No. Will it make the workplace magically better? No. But it will give us the tools to be a little closer as a company, and hopefully promote cross team communication.

scott_karana 12y ago

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.

suttree 12y ago
Working on it - www.somewhere.com - but they have a huge lead. As a networking tool that nobody likes but everybody uses, that's quite some lunch :~/

einrealist 12y ago

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?

user3141592653 12y ago

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.

mindcrime 12y ago

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 http://fogbeam.com/products.html http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

_pb 12y ago

*still not using Facebook