Facebook at Work is launching next month
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Good luck to Facebook in getting traction with corporate customers with the most atrocious privacy record of just about any company.
Good luck to Facebook in getting traction with techy customers with the most atrocious privacy record of just about any tech passionate.
/s
Just look at any facebook thread and see how many HN readers use it.
The stasi wasn't enough of a lesson.
I've also seen company employees start their own closed, private Facebook groups for work purposes because the in-house services were terrible. (I was joined to one.) It's easier than getting a group of people to sign up for a separate third-party service. (Tried that. Didn't work.)
I assume Facebook noticed this phenomenon and decided to improve on it, and exploit it.
I don't expect most users see a problem because they already trust Facebook with their personal information. And I wouldn't be surprised if users trust it more than Google, which now stands for surveillance-based advertising.
This would probably get them fired in certain companies with responsible information policies.
> I don't expect most users see a problem because they already trust Facebook with their personal information.
Which is wrong as naive in the first place.
> And I wouldn't be surprised if users trust it more than Google, which now stands for surveillance-based advertising.
Facebook stands for social manipulation advertising. Pick your poison.
Sure, but if people followed the rules, almost no work would get done. (In the UK, "working to rule" is a form of industrial action that's only a little short of a strike.)
> Which is wrong as naive in the first place.
Yeah, more than 1.6 billion people are naive and wrong.
> Facebook stands for social manipulation advertising. Pick your poison.
How does that work, then?
Otherwise, there's an ethical difference between sharing information voluntarily, for their own benefit -- which people do on Facebook -- and Google's clandestine tracking, which is for Google's benefit.
Event organization, menu updates, building maintenance updates etc.
You're right that it can't really swallow everything, but it actually helps (users) that it can't. It relegates FB to a casual thing and not a real business tool. Whether or not this is good for Facebook is a different matter, and I agree with your implication that it probably isn't.
Time to start showing recruitment agency ads to the staff members personal facebook accounts.
People (non-techs) don't seem to give a crap.
I think a lot of HN readers don't give a crap too.
Just see any thread about firefox/facebook/google/apple/whatever and HN readers will prefer X because Y.
Where X is a proprietary software or service and Y is a stupid reason.
I don't have the link but a commenter said that they value their privacy very much, but use safari over firefox because it takes 10 ms less to open. Yep!
What's your definition of a stupid reason? "I don't agree"?
That's all. Stupid was the wrong word.
It's much better than Yammer, seems to work as well if slightly better than Google+ and yet remains a huge pain in the arse. But no more so than other company communication tool.
I give it 6 months to a year before it falls into disuse.
Depends on the contract. If they break the contract their wallet's big enough to recompense.
Most companies need a platform where employees are registered, can communicate and can be looked up, and preferably a platform that employees also use.
Facebook has shown itself to be a platform people like to use, a platform that works well on desktop and mobile, can do users, groups, schedules etc.
I can see why it might be good for a lot of companies that have an unused custom Intranet with an empty bulletin board.
What about webhooks, e.g. for CI and Github related processes, or about bot support?
So basically same bullshit selling industry related to ads as Facebook.
This. After offering people, at work, trillions of hours of entertainment, now its going to help make people more productive.
But it will have a huge brand problem. Facebook has become an adjective for people slacking it out. Example, an irritated spouse "you spent the entire day on Facebook". Many IT companies' firewalls has Facebook at the top of the banned sites, during office hours.
All said, it surely can do it. But if it succeeds, it will be a bit like a porn site also deciding to become a MOOC and succeeding at it.
And now FB for work? FB's DNA is about anything but work.
The TOS will no doubt prevent them from using any proprietary data or "note taking"
Does that mean employees sign into Facebook at Work with their personal Facebook credentials?
That doesn't seem to make sense, but then why/how is the Facebook registration process better?
We have it at work and I was skeptical at first but it's not that bad. There is no concept of friends but you can follow specific people. Mainly it's based on groups so in the end it's like a stripped down Facebook that acts as a glorified front-end for mailing-lists.
I don't know how much they (will?) charge by user though.
Maybe it can be an option for new companies? It is hard to tell without the pricing information.
I'm a little torn on this as the product itself does seem like a natural use for Facebook's platform, and I'm mildly surprised they didn't do this soon. On the same note, that they didn't do this sooner makes it feel a bit more "me too", and I'm not confident the adoption rate will be strong enough to justify it going forward. Since the UI is just a mildly tweaked version of vanilla Facebook, I wonder if they had internal numbers showing that people were already doing this to justify the commitment, or if they're just hoping it will stick. I honestly feel the Facebook UI is just way too cramped and smooshed for being all that productive with, but I am also not an avid facebook user, so my opinion may be worthless. (I think VK's layout is a lot cleaner, for example...)
Right now I'm not convinced Facebook is offering enough to convince any existing users to migrate. I'm not sure it offers anything enticing over other Slack-likes to really convince users to pick it over other services. Though I appreciate them separating the two types of accounts, I think this just raises the barrier of entry, which was already pretty high compared to others.
Well, ymmv of course, but for me the technical aspects were solved by email long ago and imo dysfunctional communication mostly a human problem. It is very hard / impossible to fix pebkac with technology and from what I reading FB@W does not bring anything new to the table in that regard.
There is always the risk of them buying LinkedIn but people aren't going to make it easy.
Plenty of companies have blocked [www|m].facebook.com at the firewall, for reasons of productivity and data protection. Facebook-the-company will not jeopardise the chances of adoption of this product by doing anything that will make work.facebook.com fall foul of a similar fate.
Pity they didn't just call it Workbook, then we wouldn't have had all this confusion. Or Workface :)