Facebook at Work

I&#x27;ve seen a couple of the &quot;let&#x27;s bring social networks to the workplace&quot; products and quite frankly none have impressed me so far. The real problem is not providing great technology but actually getting people in corporate environments to use it in a meaningful way. These projects usually end in the same manner...network is rolled out, used for a couple of weeks and fades into obscurity rarely used (and often leaving an extra attack vector). Or in other words...most lose the battle to good old email.<p>That being said...this is potentially scary news for companies that are in the HR 2.0 business for lack of a better word. Typically their solutions have alumni management, stay in contact etc. that they tout. Well if your company has FB work and they later add the option to integrate private FB accounts of ex employees or something that&#x27;s interesting. I know they say for now those are separate but I wouldn&#x27;t be shocked if that changes eventually.<p>Edit: If they want to segment this they should have given it an entirely different name imo. I&#x27;m sure there are marketing people at FB that are way more brilliant than me but this seems like a typical positioning mistake. You think you need to rely on your powerful main brand when you really want to create a new brand because you&#x27;re attacking a different positioning slot in customer&#x27;s heads. Don&#x27;t have my Ries&#x2F;Trout book at hand but it sounds familiar enough that I&#x27;ll browse through it at home.

I have been trying &quot;Facebook at Work&quot; at work. As we already had a Facebook group for the company it made sense.<p>This is not a tool to compete with LinkedIn. It is a tool that competes with e-mail&#x2F;mail lists.<p>Somethings now make much more sense. From a security point of view, in a company over one thousand employees, it is easier to add or remove employees as they are hired or they left the company. Also it is easier to share work content for a limited audience while using your private Facebook account in a more casual way.<p>The main problem is that people doesn&#x27;t have so much interest in checking what&#x27;s in there. We have already other communication methods like the old good mail. So &quot;Facebook at Work&quot; is just another one to add to the list.<p>If you add it to your phone - I have done that - you will get notifications as the usual app. One of the problems is that you also will get them on weekends or when on vacations. That is not ideal.<p>As any social tool it requires a lot of fine tuning and also to match the culture and preferences of the company. Probably it is a good move for Facebook taking into account cost&#x2F;benefit, but it is never easy with social tools as Facebook competitors have seen in the past.

So... Yammer?<p>FB Work: Groups help you make decisions and keep your team on the same page.<p>Yammer: Organize all your team communication in one place with Yammer Groups. Create a single destination for your messages, files, and updates, where everyone has a view of what&#x27;s going on without all the usual back-and-forth.<p>FB Work: Get through to the people you need right away with Work Chat.<p>Yammer: Spend less time crafting perfect emails, and more time doing. Conversations in Yammer make it easy to quickly share information on a topic, have active discussions around it, and agree on next steps.<p>FB Work: Find the answers, past group posts or the files you need using search.<p>Yammer: Find what you need, right when you need it. Yammer seamlessly enables connections to people and information from across your organization that you never knew existed, making it easier to move your work forward.<p>FB Work: As a Facebook at Work customer, you also have controls to manage your organization’s data how you see fit.<p>Yammer: Public Groups for working in the open; Private Groups for sensitive ideas. Safely collaborate with partners and customers with External Groups.<p>Yep. Yammer.

This is a product I would actively shun.<p>For better of worse, my prejudice of facebook is that it is an outstanding source of the following types of content:<p>Humblebrag b.s. instagram photos<p>passive aggressive shitposting about politics<p>I can use social networks at work- but if they actually brought facebook in and demanded that we used it, I might consider quitting. I&#x27;d probably write a python script to repost random technical shit from a reasonable set of Twitter sources. But no way would I be happy about bringing facebook into my office.

I clicked this hopeful that Facebook had made a new product tailored to the needs of an office. Instead it seems like they recently decided that their existing product just happens to already be the perfect product for the office and rebranded it.<p>I don&#x27;t buy this at all, teams don&#x27;t actually collaborate by sending each other green giraffe stickers.

We&#x27;ve used &quot;Facebook for Work&quot; at work. It is highly distracting in IMO.<p>One of the best productivity hacks is to never log into Facebook or any social accounts when at work. Now, we are working on it which keeps sending you notifications all day long and especially over the weekend.<p>You like or comment saying - &quot;Awesome, well deserved.&quot; The 100 people are going to do the same too. It&#x27;s super annoying.<p>This and the fact that you move on to your feed and then shitty videos, pics, buzzfeed and boom ! your whole afternoon is gone !

I&#x27;m pretty sure this is going to be big. I think Slack is so successful not just because of the chat interface and the integrations, but because people reliably receive notifications, messages can contain attachments that are presented in a helpful way, and because it has good ways of organizing groups. Facebook has everything but the chat interface and the integrations. I don&#x27;t see any reason for them not to add these.

This ignores mountains of evidence that shows realtime, synchronous communication makes you less productive due to reducing (or eliminating) your ability to focus.

This should have a [2015] or 2014 in the subject. This is not new, and is not really fully launched so its not really an interesting story for the most part.<p>(0) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;facebook-at-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;facebook-at-work&#x2F;</a> (1) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;facebook-at-work-ios-android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;facebook-at-work-ios-androi...</a>

Relevant piece of trivia: I went to a meetup at Facebook&#x27;s London offices a few months back and heard a presentation from the FB @ Work lead. This may surprise some but FB @ Work was entirely built by their London team in London.<p>As you can imagine, they had to touch just about every part of the Facebook code base to make it happen. They still managed to pull it off despite being a &quot;remote&quot; team and unknown entity at first. Great to see some major engineering projects being owned here in the UK.

I wonder if this product was conceived in a Utopian vacuum by FB employees where they think all other companies operate in a similar fashion as theirs, where everyone is brilliant, motivated, young, high-tech, and are always aiming at the apex of the Maslow&#x27;s pyramid; and have similar pain points.<p>I&#x27;m not being sarcastic (to the down voter). If you&#x27;re an &quot;A&quot; talent, and are always used to working in certain type of environment, your view is quite skewed. How do you really know how a normal 30-people small business operate?

In one of the screenshots, it shows how many people are &quot;following&quot; an employee. This is reminiscent of Enron&#x27;s peer-evaluation process commonly referred to as &quot;rank and yank&quot;. Since employee evaluations were based on ratings made by their coworkers, this led to unpopular employees being fired, and other employees engaging in questionable business practices to stay on top.<p>I can easily imagining the type of boss who thinks this would be good for their office to also believe that someone who doesn&#x27;t have as many followers isn&#x27;t a &quot;team player&quot;.

In my undergrad studies in college, Facebook groups were commonly used as a way to create light weight shared group pages for study groups, projects, etc. I could see this being useful in the business world working in the same way.<p>Specifically, most of the time someone would make a group for a study group and then everyone would use the group page to post meeting times, relevant files, etc. Group chats were used for quick communication, etc.<p>The benefit this has over something like Slack is that it is something everyone is used to and comfortable with already. People, for the most part, understand what a group page is and how to post on one. People get how to send an IM or start a group chat. There is virtually no learning curve.

Because having all your work related communication on Facebook&#x27;s servers is certainly something you want as a company.

More and more, I push for more in-house and self-hosted services for things like this.<p>If I‘m using this as a regular workflow, I want to know that it won‘t go away one day.

Any theories on why they&#x27;re using Wordpress.com VIP for this?

&gt; For companies who get things done<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quickanddirtytips.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;grammar&#x2F;is-it-a-company-who-or-a-company-that" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quickanddirtytips.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;grammar&#x2F;is-it-a-c...</a>

We actually tried this for our company. Our initial response was that the product is a bad clone of the main FB (cloned maybe in React). Apart from that, it didn&#x27;t make much sense to use FB@Work for anything. So we switched back to slack.

I don&#x27;t really see the need for this, since the things you usually do on Facebook are not the same things you would do at a workplace community.

I just don&#x27;t believe having Facebook opened at work will in any way <i>increase</i> my productivity.

Social feeds, open chat rooms, getting followers—these are all ingredients of an highly addictive product, the typical instant gratification product of our generation. At work you do not need that shit. Normal Facebook can be excellent for professional networking and sometimes way better than Linkedin but why Facebook for productivity?<p>You want to communicate? Every productivity solution has some chat, which can extend in seconds to a multi-user chat, to a call or video call (Hangouts, Office365). But yeah you can also use Slack, Hipchat or whatever, no rocket science for a decade. You want a feed of your coworkers? Why? You want to follow coworkers? Why? You have Facebook already.<p>Email, messaging, video calls, an office with collaborating features and a task&#x2F;ticket management solution. THAT&#x27;S IT, you do not need more. Depending on the industry and profession some more and specialized stuff might be required (such as CRM, SFA).<p>I am wondering how the Facebook London remote team got the approval for this nonsense from Zuckerberg.

I have always felt that the problem with linkedin wasn&#x27;t so much the &#x27;questionable&#x27; growth tactics (fake contacts which don&#x27;t actually have accounts, etc) as much as the absolutely abysmal content that gets posted there.<p>Whenever I go on linkedin, I&#x27;m spammed with an insane amount of articles about &#x27;leadership&#x27; which are written in the worst kind of HR&#x27;ese by people that are blatantly trying to promote their brand. Facebook and Twitter are interesting because people share cool things which I like reading.<p>The kind of content that people create&#x2F;share on linkedin makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Don&#x27;t even get me started on &#x27;influencers&#x27;. Ugh.<p>So - the problem with professional social media is that people sanitize everything so much that it&#x27;s completely uninteresting to read. You could have a wonderful product, but it will be a beautiful shell filled with meaningless self promoting garbage.

These &quot;slick&quot; videos with ultra fake chirpy videos make me sick nowadays.<p>Oatmeal should draw a comic about this.

I dread the day when I have to use this at work.

I agree with a lot of the concerns in the posts so far.<p>As of now it is simply Facebook with a different colour and focused on a group. Nothing special.<p>But I do think that Facebook will end up releasing a better collaboration feature to help integrate teams into Facebook At Work.<p>The reason I love Slack currently is the various apps and addons you can add, like the Github bot that posts when a pull request is created, or the Trello one that posts when someone completes a task.<p>If FB adds something like this (or better), I think they will grab a large portion of the market that isn&#x27;t already dedicated to Slack.<p>Then it will slowly be improving features to steal Slack users after that.

When it sorts remotely similiar to original Facebook. I would miss 90% of the important posts and end up with the cat pics from the secretary. I dont think Facebook works for that at all.

What I really want is a &quot;linkedin at work&quot; kind of product. In large cross functional organziations, it is often not easy to find who is the right person to talk to. For example, in a ecommerce firm, if you item description is wrong, you do not necessarily know whom to contact. I would like a product, internal to a company, where people write about all things they work on, in linkedin style summaries. Hopefully, this will have similar features in future.

This, good or bad, suffers from exactly the same problem other large internet companies &quot;feature&quot;: What i like to call &quot;Customer-No-Service&quot;.<p>This is a feature whereby they get you to rely on their platform for various services and, when you need support, well, there ain&#x27;t none. No email, phone, fax, telegram, hell not even smoke signals.<p>And, of course, the added bonus is the traditionally unannounced account shutdown or suspension for no apparent fucking reason at all or some bullshit unpublished reason. What&#x27;s best is that these are often followed by cryptic emails informing you of the account suspension. To make things even better, these emails are crafted to actually provide negative information and send you to the imsane asylum if you dare try to make any sense out of them. And, of course, no recourse whatsoever.<p>Yeah, no, thanks. I like to sleep at night.

But I thought Zuck said you lack integrity if you can&#x27;t be the exact same person in every single social context? Why wouldn&#x27;t you just make friends with your coworkers on your regular Facebook account? After all, only criminals have anything to hide, so why allow people to make separate profiles?

Considering I&#x27;m already Facebook friends with all my coworkers, being FB Work friends with them feels like presenting fake versions of ourselves to each other.<p>Keeping Facebook for personal stuff, and Hipchat&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;Google for professional communication seems to work well for me.

Splitting domains of operation spurs need to sort people and interactions between domains. I worry about stuff leaking from my work account to &quot;social&quot; and vice versa. I do not organize my contacts in skype and I do not want to tag my friends into fb work. Facebook has been one of those enterprises that have sidestepped this problem by &quot;tell me what school and when you have attended and I will tell you that you can message your alumni&quot; type thing.<p>About.me is in trend where resumes aren&#x27;t enough anymore - people use it tell about themselves as human beings not corporate drones. Maybe this is the continuation of this trend. Friends(humans first not employees) working on cool things.

One more big issue with this is, one value of Facebook is that you can carry history with it. But with this @work version, I cannot possibly see how you can have access to your previous company. It will never work the way that regular Facebook would.

You&#x27;ve just given me the info I was searching for. You touched on a topical issue. I would appreciate if you&#x27;d written about how to fill a form online. I am sure at least once in your life you had to fill out a form. I use a simple service &lt;a href=&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.ac&#x2F;7ZvoKq&quot;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.ac&#x2F;7ZvoKq&quot;</a> &gt;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.ac&#x2F;7ZvoKq&lt;&#x2F;a&gt;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.ac&#x2F;7ZvoKq&lt;&#x2F;a&gt;</a> for forms filling. It definitely makes my life easier!

I don&#x27;t see a clear answer on whether or not Facebook will analyze or use the data in any way. It is said that a company can &quot;control&quot; the data, but I&#x27;d like to know how Facebook will handle the data.

Something about this creeps me out.<p>Next up &quot;Facebook staring at you watching you sleep&quot;.

Given what they did to Parse, this doesn&#x27;t inspire much confidence. Also, tech companies would find it hard to ditch Slack for its numerous API integrations with services such as Atlassian, Github, Fog Creek.

If I were facebook, I would have hid this page for a month or two. I sure hope this causes the most traditional of French mobilizations against finalizing a new data safe harbor given that the ramifications for workers who are essentially unable to object have never been dealt with.<p>I&#x27;ve found general software contracts to be a questionable thing to involve normal status employees in, cloud services (especially online tests and training) have muddied the water, and with social tool usage in the workplace, I have to wonder if there still is any water.

So no onsite data storage and no at rest encryption? These are the reasons we have been having issues with Slack. I was hoping they would address these clear gaps in the enterprise market.

I thought this was new, but apparently they announced working on it around June 2014 and even had the apps around since early 2015 which would explain how the Google Play app already has 60k reviews... Discovered this while looking for comparisons to Salesforce&#x27;s Chatter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;facebookwork-vs-salesforce-chatter-vincent-rochebrun-rodriguez" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;facebookwork-vs-salesforce-ch...</a>

We have Slack&#x2F;HipChat and emails, why Facebook At Work? I just don&#x27;t see the value to post everything at work in a news feed style, does it provide any value?

What strikes me is how enterprise-y the design of theh website is. It&#x27;s pretty much the antithesis of Slack.<p>A lot of people rely on Facebook for engaging audiences and social media campaigns, so it&#x27;s very understandable that <i>some</i> companies might want to use this. I don&#x27;t see this as a replace ment for Slack, though, but rather some of the dreadful social media platform integrations out there.

So is this supposed to be an alternative to Yammer? Because that thing is terrible. Not just the implementation, but the very idea. Normal Facebook at least has some element of fun to it.<p>What&#x27;s the purpose of the same thing, but for work? To share a bunch of the same &quot;professional&quot; garbage that people share on LinkedIn and maybe try to look smart in front of the boss?<p>Seriously, who actually <i>wants</i> to use something like this?

Facebook for work is LinkedIn.

Has anyone experienced using an internal social network at a startup or small business?<p>My company has grown from 10 to 30 employees across 3 states, and the only communication tools used by everyone are Slack and Gmail.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is something most people here would bother to actively use. Is there a minimum threshold where it becomes more commonplace? Maybe with 100 people?

Does this work in China? We&#x27;re considering giving it a try but the biggest concern is that one of our office is located in China.

I can&#x27;t access this website at work. I think the first step would be to get corporate firewalls to open up!

I don&#x27;t want a social network like Facebook at work. This takes all of the worst parts of Slack and makes them worse.

I didn&#x27;t bother checking this out, but I feel like this is round 2. I remember when facebook was only limited to schools and then workplaces before being available to all. At the time, they optimized their &quot;modules&quot; to better facilitate &quot;work&#x2F;study&quot; environments.<p>If this is indeed round 2, this is great!

I will not use a product supported by advertising for internal communication.<p>The demographic data they would mine would be invaluable to them, but for a company would be unconscionable to give to a third party. Especially one so historically lax about privacy.<p>You can mine my social life all you want, but when it comes to business, get the hell away.

All of the use cases for this, Slack more or less solves, which Events being a Slack integration away.<p>That being said, outside of the HN Community and outside of Tech savvy companies who know and prefer Slack, it&#x27;s not completely useless. It&#x27;s sure as hell better than Email groups and Calendar events in my opinion.

Right, and Facebook totally swears not to archive all conversations for &quot;market research&quot; and optimization.<p>Seriously, their reputation for doing whatever they want with your information is well earned, what business would willingly expose their internal operations to this company?

Uh... Is this an attack on Slack?<p>I have so many things to say about this but the last time I said anything anti-F B on H N I got lawyers against me.<p>Please god people don&#x27;t use this.<p>Edit:<p>I&#x27;m going to qualify my sentiment.<p>FB thinks that &quot;making the world more connected&quot; is a good thing (TM) -- and in an utopian sense that may be true... But FB is not utopian.<p>See the fucking onion article. You all know the one.<p>The world doesn&#x27;t need to be &quot;more connected&quot; --- it needs to be <i></i><i>more conscious</i><i></i> --- and very little work by many many startups are <i></i><i>&quot;making the world a better place&quot;</i><i></i><p>The fact is that the world is still just as dark as always. Slavery is up, consumption begets inequality and the worlds economies are all about consumption.<p>How about creating an economy based on provisioning and providing. But because fuck you, that&#x27;s why, is the philos of the day.<p>Zuck needs to read his letter to his daughter and then read that same letter to one who has zero relation or zero connection to FB. If the only person he is committed to making the world a better place for is his child through his tax shelter, then we will truly know the morality of FB.<p>Good fucking luck.<p>&#x2F;rant

Organizations that want an internal social network should also evaluate Jive. The UI isn&#x27;t as slick as Facebook but overall I&#x27;ve been happy with it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jivesoftware.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jivesoftware.com</a>

The company I work for uses Google services and, as a part of that, Google+ events pretty extensively. Of course, that&#x27;s exactly the feature Google decided to remove from their fancy new UI... It&#x27;s still accessible via the old interface though.

The most interesting thing is this fb site was &#x27;Powered by WordPress.com VIP&#x27;, LMAO

Something similar, with an on-premise that&#x27;s very mature is Bitrix[1].<p>It&#x27;s a terrifying beast to setup, but once setup correctly it&#x27;s actually pretty fun.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitrix24.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitrix24.com</a>

Really? After Slack, Yammer, and LinkedIn this is all they have to offer?<p>Totally uninspiring. DOA.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;work.facebook.com&#x2F;confirmemail.php?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwork.facebook.com%2F%3Femail&amp;rd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;work.facebook.com&#x2F;confirmemail.php?next=https%3A%2F%...</a><p>phew!

I wonder how this compares to Google+ for work?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;answer&#x2F;1631858?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;answer&#x2F;1631858?hl=en</a>

Social vs Work, which one should we be more serious? Can they work together? I think probably not. Work productivity will decrease dramatically if we shift our focus to social.

I think Facebook at Work and Slack try to fill the non existent gap between the old fashioned Outlook &#x2F; VOIP + desktop sharing &#x2F; chitchat at the watercooler.

facebook&#x27;s downfall - trying to be everything for everyone

Sounds like a great way to get hacked and loose propriatory rights to intellectual Property.. you&#x27;d have to be insane to sign up for this!

Facebook doesn&#x27;t have my trust now. They shut down things easily without taken into consideration their users. See what it did to Parse.

I&#x27;ve applied for this multiple times in the past year and never heard anything back, so don&#x27;t except much.

So Facebook axed Parse, while devoting resources to this instead? Mark Zuckerberg is really losing it.

Wouldn&#x27;t knowing Facebook&#x27;s profit model be enough to deter any company from using it internally?

Anybody else having issues with the video on their main page? It doesn&#x27;t load for me on Chrome.

If fb can oust that abomination LinkedIn out if professional space, I&#x27;ll be ecstatic.

It look me longer than I would like to admit to realize this wasn&#x27;t satire.

Where&#x27;s the pricing section? Is this going to be ad supported? Cross subsidized?

Do they have todo lists for teams? Team Calendar with intelligence features?

This is merely Facebook sharing the way it does work at its workplace.

In direct competition with Slack, let&#x27;s see how this panes out.

I need two things to consider this:<p>- Like semantics (Like to mark as completed?)<p>- Markdown

Not sure how this will affect Jive, Tibbr and the likes.

Why on earth does this site attempt to remotely log you in to WordPress? It was completely jarring to have the WordPress bar appear above the site.<p>EDIT: Seems they are using the WordPress.com VIP service. That explains that.

it seems like one major thing this is missing is a ticketing and triaging system. What does Facebook use for this internally?

Seems like an obvious competitor to Slack.

Soooo, facebook is trying to be slack?

This sounds nightmarish honestly.

Sweet. Bring Facebook data mining and privacy practices to the workplace!<p>What could go wrong!

slack by facebook

fuck this shit

Never has it been more apparent that morality doesn&#x27;t come into the equation for Facebook.

As @voynich61 has mentioned, there&#x27;s something incredibly morally murky about this product.<p>The first thing that came to my head is stalking. Before Facebook &quot;Work&quot;, the workplace was relatively safe. As long as you don&#x27;t provide any info, such as phone numbers, personal email address, and had some pretty good privacy settings, you could deflect some potential stalkers at work.<p>For the sake of the argument, I&#x27;m going to assume that with Facebook Work, you login with your normal Facebook account, because, you know, ease of signing up, etc. And I&#x27;m going to further assume that this &quot;work&quot; thing will also make a copy of your profile picture, bio details, etc.<p>With all this information, it&#x27;s not going to be hard for co-workers to start harassing you online. And since it&#x27;s the same workplace, you&#x27;ll soon have to rebuffing them both offline and online.<p>Additionally, employers will easily find your personal information, such as things you did on the weekend, embarrassing photos that shouldn&#x27;t be shared around the workplace, etc.<p>While I sort-of (not really) congratulate Facebook on trying out some new moves, there are some lines that shouldn&#x27;t be crossed, and lately, Facebook has been crossing all of them. Free Basics, is the latest example that comes to mind. I know in the past Facebook has had a &quot;hacker&quot; mentality when making new products, but for a company as big as Facebook, I wish they gave their products a bit more thought before attempting them.