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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

Facebook actually uses Facebook heavily internally. Groups, calendars, etc. It's certainly not a mandate, it's used because it works for them.

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I'd argue that they consciously make it work for them internally, despite lots of pain points solved by other tools better suited for the job.

For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working. Similarly, Facebook's group chat isn't the best archival tool, nor does it support features like merging posts or transferring them from one group to another.

You're assuming that Facebook internal is the same, feature by feature, as commercial Facebook. I promise you it isn't.

If they turned that version into a service that could run on-premises, inside a company's network, then I think they could have a real chance at becoming the communication and coordination medium for most companies.

> For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working.

He does; he’s a bit of an outlier in how he can handle intense communications, but Messenger at his scale is not less manageable than e-mail — it mainly encourages extreme brevity.

The information filtering is done using groups and notification that allow everyone to target their attention; his is focused on high-level groups that distill details from other working groups.

There's no mandate in my company that users stick with Google Apps for calendars, groups, document sharing, etc. But any department that went with their own tool for any of that would be their Island that wouldn't interoperate with the rest of the office.

That doesn't mean that Google Apps is the best tool, or even that it works well for everyone, but it means that people are willing to put up with a less than perfect solution that's integrated with the rest of the company.

So a kind of vendor lockin.

Of course in the above FB scenario this is not a problem because they're the vendor.

I can see that working wonderfully for Facebook, because it's all internal. But other companies can't really do that, because it's not okay for most other employees at most other companies to do all of their work-related coordination through a third-party.

> It's certainly not a mandate, it's used because it works for them.

It actually is. The vast majority of essential information is in there; HR tools, some IT stuff is based on integration with the Facebook codebase.

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