Facebook to Launch Social Media Service for Internal Company Connections
posted Sunday Jan 18, 2015 by Nicholas DiMeo
Are you so into the world of Facebook that you need to have it in your life at all times, even at work? Well lucky for you Facebook is hoping to make that a reality and will be bringing the water cooler and social media - your two favorite places - together for the daily nine-to-five.
Dubbed "Facebook@Work," the platform will be more focused towards productivity instead of procrastination. An employer can use the program and connect all of the employees together to connect and discuss news, join groups, message each other and create events. The kicker here is that you won't be able to sync up your friends and connections into Facebook@Work, and instead it will be a separate site that users will be interacting with.
Think of it like a weird cross between Microsoft Lync and Skype. The service will essentially be competing with Chatter from Salesforce and Microsoft's recent $1.2 billion acquisition, Yammer, among others. Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said that F@W has been working beautifully, at least internally, and that Facebook employees have had success using it.
We have internally used Facebook at Work for many years now, it works pretty effectively and efficiently for collaboration. We think we can bring this insight to other companies.
Currently, the talks are that Facebook will be considering a subscription model for the service, but will also likely offer an ad-supported lite version for free. Considering how much of a beast the Facebook snooping advertising platform is, I'm unsure if I'd want employees for my company using Facebook@Work for internal communication and file-sharing. I just get this weird feeling that someone will be sharing some documentation on a new idea through the service, and somehow Facebook would end up launching an identical feature set the very next day.
