Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

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151 pointsdarklrd139 comments

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.

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?

That comparison doesn't make sense. Google's SREs doesn't get out of bed just because you can't access your powerpoint either.

That is because Google has technicians 24/7/365 at their data centers.

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.

Back when I worked in law, it was the case that the EU had very strict laws regarding where (physically) you store data, and who can access the data.

That meant that EU based firms could only buy our Install-behind-your-firewall version.

Is it the same for the financial district, perhaps?

Well, what's your threat model that you are worried about? I would imagine all of these companies have much better security and reliability than most internal IT departments. And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. The NSA can get what they want anyways.

The one big issue is subpoena's / third party doctrine issues, but I imagine for many companies that's a decent tradeoff for the reduced IT overhead / security / reliability issues. Other industries, like law, should obviously avoid such services.

>>And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes.

This is snarky, but have you looked? If you were suddenly trying to be acquired by FB, would you want all your secrets available to them? Sure, that particular problem affects a very small percentage of companies, but I'm not evil enough to imagine all the ways FB could and would use your data.

These don't seem like particularly new concerns to me, though. U.S. businesses have used 3rd parties to carry or store sensitive information for decades.

Do you worry that Verizon is listening to or recording all your phone calls? Or FedEx is opening and reading the documents you're overnighting around? Or that document storage companies are opening every box they store, in case there's something useful in there? How do you know Quickbooks isn't mining your bookkeeping data so they can sell leads to tax or collections firms?

And what about IAAS and PAAS companies like AWS, Google Compute, or even hosting companies like Rackspace or Softlayer, who typically have root access to every machine they manage? How many companies--even big companies--own all their servers and the buildings they are in?

Ultimately, our economy is based on specialization and carefully constructed relationships of mutual obligation. Contracts have to mean something or there's not much business going to get done.

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes.

Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

> The NSA can get what they want anyways.

If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren't cheap and using them too often soon makes them worthless.)

> Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's ridiculous that a forum like this would fall for such fear mongering.

> Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails

Well, except when they do. http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

> An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds

It's more than that. For example, they also scan images to identify child porn. Or Google Buzz, which showed that they scan and track the people you contact most often, and may do undesirable things with that information, like publish it.

It's naive to expect that Google/Facebook/whatever supplier of corporate IT stuff will just serve as a wholly passive platform, especially if the service is not paid.

I'd change that 'read' to 'scan' but I can't anymore. I really don't care about that particular phrasing. Not being a native speaker I don't think I'm even qualified to argue the semantics of the word 'read' and whether it can be applied to an algorithm or not.

I was trying to point out that some level of snooping by the cloud providers themselves is going on right now. Note that I tried to defend Google's behavior by saying that it is no secret and people are opting into it willfully.

I think the important point here is that you still have some anonymity in the sense that your data is processed in the same way as everybody else's. Saying "Google reads your emails" is basically a fear-inducing way of saying "Google scans everybody's emails."

Yes, they scan your emails. But not _particularly_.

Google also read your mail to store it on disk or send it over the network.

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes.

That is contrary to the history of how companies take advantage of data provided to them, even when that data is supposed to be confidential.

If don't own the pipe, then you don't own the data.

I agree with you. But.

It's not difficult to argue that we're in a new era of computing when a hacking attempt against your company's IT stack hacked is very likely, if you have any info of interest. So companies have two choices: secure and maintain their infrastructure more than they ever used to (= spending more than they ever used to), or transfer their infrastructure to companies that will do it for them.

I don't blame anyone who does the latter.

So, third parties may want your data, and the solution is throw in the towel and just give the data pre-emptively to third parties?

Gotcha.

Exactly. Facebook is the one hacking you in the first place so they can get you to store your data with Facebook. Sterling analysis, sir!

No. Illegitimate third parties, such as criminals, want your data. So you throw in the towel and give your data to legitimate third party companies that you have signed privacy and service contracts with. They're really not comparable.

You may not have read many corporate IT legal policies lately.

If you own the network, you can at least monitor access violations.

guess what? not every company can afford or even convince the best, ereetest security professionals to work for them.

most companies can't even configure their printers correctly, how do you expect them to harden their public facing servers?

you live in hackerland, and not reality.

This is a bad excuse. So a printer leaks information to the internet and that's why I should leak all information to Facebook? Try to convince an CIO with that.

If only bandwidth was cheap and abundent.

Don't forget Hipchat/Slack - IM

How about putting emphasis on "have to" instead? For most people, the advantage of these services is that you get very good services for little cost. It's simply cheaper to use 3rd party services. That why they've become so popular.

The question companies should be asking themselves is "How bad do you want NSA/FBI/police to scour through your data without ever telling you about it?"

If the answer is "Pretty bad!" - then they should go ahead and sign-up for Facebook at Work.

Better you upload your unencrypted data to a third party you know about, than that some hacker collective uploads your unencrypted data to pastebin for you. I think Sony pictures would have been quite a lot better off if their data was all on Google drive and Facebook.

Sony was probably the victim of an insider (http://nypost.com/2014/12/30/new-evidence-sony-hack-was-insi...).

It is incredibly difficult to prevent attacks from technical people inside your own company, and when this happens to a company like Google or Facebook it will be a huge disaster.

I guess ERP will be the next thing to end up in the cloud, probably wouldn't be too hard for Facebook to extend this new product to generate timesheets for each employee.

Salesforce has been pushing this for years.

SAP is already in the cloud and winding-down its on-your-site applications.

http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/cloud.html

They're buying-up cloud app vendors as fast as Oracle is...

I'm a netsec freak that doesn't have ANY social media accounts, but I can't rationalize hating on this.

Social Networking at the workplace has potential to really make things flow better, and you're using it on the behalf of a company rather than putting anything personal on there. I'm not afraid of vacation photos leaking to the internet because I'm not going to have them anywhere near this service.

I'm sick of receiving emails like, "Jeff is out today" when instead I could look at the meeting event on my FB@Work account and see that Jeff is no longer attending.

Information in the workplace really does need a bit of decluttering and I see this as a positive thing.

Just as you don't own your work computer and shouldn't have anything personal on it that you're not willing to have your bosses see, don't include any information on here that is anything other than planning around getting real work done and poking others about a ticket.

(If they include ticketing, I could see this being huge. Someone needs to bring request tracker to the modern era.)

And then one day somebody is going to realize "F%!#, none of this stuff talks to the rest of this stuff" and the tide will shift the other way. :-)

I don't think you're a shrinking minority at all, especially since the article itself mentions that people are concerned.

The problem with this approach is that you also give up control. Want an extra feature or bugfix? Petition FB and see if anything happens. Want to interface with some other system? Get used to browser hacks (cf all those things for Gmail).

I also find it laughable that the article discussed whether or not there will be ads - as if that's the most salient point. Of course the companies will be paying for it and it's obvious to me that FB will want to mine that data regardless of whether they happen to show you ads. They'll also be strongly encouraging users to link accounts too so that the profiles they have of you are even more complete. Depending on how this is adopted, some of my friends who've avoided FB may be forced to join anyway via their employers. Should they switch jobs?

Having said all the above, I'm sure this product will be successful. Most groupware in companies sucks (just think of the convoluted way of arranging a meeting), so a UI like FBs is a great step forward - esp since most of your employees likely need no training.

FWIW I'm working on decentralised alternatives. I don't want to live in a world where my future kids' only options are to either give a tiny handful of companies unfettered access to everything or to go and (literally) live in a cave. http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

I'd absolutely switch jobs if I was required to set up a Facebook for Work account with my real information. Then again, I'm an engineer, and am allowed a certain amount of leeway with my crackpot privacy theories.

"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.

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.

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.

Was Wave even a social network? I vaguely remember it being more like a real-time Google Docs before Google Docs went realtime.

The original vision was "email replacement".

Funny, I remember Docs being realtime at the same time as Wave was around.

The problem with Wave was nobody knew what it was.

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?

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!

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-searc...

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.

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

Well I never used it after Microsoft put it through their software "enterprizer." I seem to remember reading a product announcement when they released it, and understood that they had nerfed it pretty badly.

> significant contributions he has had since his time in Facebook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search was his biggest.

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.

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"

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.

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.

Jive Software is used successfully by the majority of Fortune 500s.

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.

That's definitely a big part of it.

For a social network to have value, you need users who are compelled to frequently submit content. By adding a power structure, users have to evaluate their decisions, which can generate anxiety or extra work, leading to a drop off in contribution rate.

It's one of the reasons teenagers ditched Facebook once their parents joined.

Do you have any data to back that up? Don't mean that in a snipey kind of way. Fascinating observation.

It's not quite a social network, but Skype got quite a bit of use at my previous company. If there was a topic that people wanted to share links or ideas or discuss things about, we created a new Skype group with everyone pertinent in it. We had serious and less serious Skype groups too.

So we'd have one for the Project X team discussion, and another for Project Y team discussion, one that included the QA team if we needed to discuss bugs with them, and we'd make a temporary one if we just needed to discuss prep for an upcoming meeting, etc. And then we had the group that wanted to share meme pics and youtube links, and the group that wanted to share links to metal music, and another to discuss anime, etc.

You could also put in filters so it only notifies you if certain words appear in the chat, like your name or some feature you're in charge of. It was simple, dynamic, and more effective than any other company I've worked for before or since.

We use Socialcast where I work. Works pretty well. Lots of channels for various stuff and interests. For instance technologies and sports.

We use Yammer where I work and some groups use them and some don't. I find that there's very little reason to use it.

Most communication happens in Outlook/Exchange mailing lists.

I do think that Yammer and it's ilk offer somethings that plain email don't - better attachment integration and history (with email you can't see discussions that occurred before you joined).

One thing I don't like about Yammer (and other social networks for work) is that discussions are very "flat". Contrasted to email discussions at my work, which can get very lengthy and include many branches. They wouldn't scale to Yammer at all.

At least in the early days of Google+, the internal instance was really great. I don't work there anymore so I don't know if it is any more. But people would post about stuff they're working on, questions they have, frustrations, etc. I thought it was super useful. Much more useful than external Google+ has ever been...

The social network/collaboration tool we use at gigantic_company is fairly useful. However it's mostly a less-usable version of facebook with document sharing bolted on.

One of the bigger issues with the tool, however, is adoption. Maybe an enterprise facebook would have a higher usage rate because everyone already knows how to use it?

If everyone actually used the official collab tool here at gigantic_company it'd be a lot easier to find out if another department already solved your problem so you could learn from their implementation, rather than relying on the tribal knowledge of someone who's been here for years and years. I'd like that.

Microsoft uses Yammer as its corporate social network (obviously), and it's pretty active. Since teams working on the same product are in different buildings/cities, there's a group for each product/feature/team and people ask and answer questions pretty frequently. I personally use it as a public knowledge bank to search for solutions to issues I'm having before sending out a group email.

For smaller companies where all employees are in the same place I guess it wouldn't have as much value though.

Google runs an internal version of Google+ for employees only. I dare say it is more active than the public version.

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?

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.

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.

Google Docs doesn't have the much-vaunted "stream."

Going to docs.google.com simply brings up, well, docs.

Google+ does though.. but I guess that really only applies to Google Apps accounts

http://i.imgur.com/53t8rKS.png

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.

The same way that no serious workplace trusts Google/Dropbox with handling any company data and IP today, right?

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.

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.

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.

Just think how convenient it'll be when Facebook CorpDev wants to approach your company. They won't even need to ask any questions!

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.

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.

Perhaps its simply to get a different revenue stream other than ads. Very vulnerable to adblockers.

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.

> 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.

Selling it does not necessarily mean giving up that advantage.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

What could possibly go wrong!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Can you not do that with Diaspora?

Maybe you can. I guess I should look into that. Perhaps Friendica as well.

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]

I think that would be basically competing with Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft.

Is/was Wave in this space?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

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

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.

This is a separate account from your existing Facebook account.

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'.

Maybe not, but it might eat into a lot of document/collaboration platforms.

Disagree 100% - have you used Slack?

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.

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/quoddy_enterprise.html

https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

*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.

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.

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.

If it makes you feel any better for them they sold for 1.2 billion to Microsoft in 2012

Ah, what a relief.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 :~/

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.

If you actually read the article you'd see that there is practically no overlap with LinkedIn whatsoever.

This seems much closer to sharepoint.

facebook got big when they copied twitter

They also got big when they started scouring peoples inboxes for contacts, one of the largest security breaches in Net history.

> 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"?

You can be mandated to use it for work.

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