
Facebook is building an enterprise product dubbed "FBWork" - onedev
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/facebook-at-work/
======
skizm
I don't get all the Facebook hate. Facebook only knows what you tell it. Put
up a profile, don't post too much or at all, don't download the app (use the
mobile version), don't use facebook connect, and don't use any facebook apps.

Just use it to keep in touch or get back in touch with people you otherwise
would not be able to.

Sure, they're like any other company and will relentlessly push for your to
share more and do whatever they can get away with to access more of your
personal information, but that sort of comes with the territory. They are
basically an identity management company after all.

~~~
robert_tweed
> Facebook only knows what you tell it.

Firstly, that's incorrect. Facebook also knows what other people tell it and
what it is able to correlate from other data sources. To be fair to them,
they've handled the issue with group photo tagging fairly well, but only after
there was uproar about it.

They are in the business of collecting and monetising your data. That's
fundamentally not in your interests and it's incredibly difficult to stop them
from doing it, especially outside the EU. That is why a lot of people hate
them.

~~~
bgun
> They are in the business of collecting and monetising your data. That's
> fundamentally not in your interests

I hate when phrases like this are thrown about; the collection of your data
CAN be very much in your interests, and the monetization thereof makes it
free, which is also clearly the preference of most.

The fact that everyone I keep in touch with uses the same system has amazing
utility for me. Privacy protections are important, but harping on them as if
there is no conceivable personal benefit to data collection turns these
discussions into partisan bickering that's hard to take seriously.

~~~
robert_tweed
It can be in your interests for businesses to know things about you. However
it is always in your interests for you to be in control of your own personal
data and how it is used, which is not how Facebook operates.

Whether or not FB as a platform is useful is irrelevant to the issue of data
ownership. Where people have a particular issue with FB, it is, ignoring Mark
Zuckerberg's own statements, that as a business they are reliant on what you
might call adversarial data collection: i.e., they will take whatever they can
get, not just what you explicitly give them.

Contrast that with say, Google, who have been heading in a similar direction
for a while now, but they don't predicate their entire business model on it.

If Google stopped collecting your data today they would still have a very
viable business selling advertising based on search terms. If FB stopped
collecting data, the company would shut down. Thus any utility you get from
Facebook is being paid for by a specific model of data collection that happens
to be contrary to your best interests.

You might be happy with that trade-off but a lot of people aren't. I for one
an unhappy with the fact they have become a defacto standard that's getting
increasingly difficult to avoid.

------
dapulselabs
Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for this kind of solution right now, we are
making a tool for companies and teams to collaborate and work better.

Check us out at: [https://dapulse.com/](https://dapulse.com/)

~~~
Torn
From reading the website, the impression I get of daPulse is a mix of project
management tools with some social networking, viewed through the lense of task
tracking.

What's the appeal over something like JIRA?

~~~
dapulselabs
AFAWK, JIRA is tasks for R&D, period.

daPulse is a collaboration tool, so R&D, design, marketing, management -
everyone in the company uses it.

It is a bit like you described, PM + social + tasks, but it's designed to help
everyone focus on the 'big things'. What it really does is gives everyone in
the company one unified view of top priorities, so everyone's in focus on
what's important and it gets everyone collaborating with zero e-mails.

~~~
Torn
I think you're under-estimating JIRA!

As well as task tracking, reports and categorisation there's all kinds of
dashboards, agile views (swimlanes, etc), as well as social features like
commenting and @mentioning.

------
threeseed
So basically they are making a competitor to Yammer. Hardly surprising given
that they have been without a serious competitor for a while now.

Facebook could do some real damage there.

~~~
beej1981
The space is actually quite crowded. According to IDC, IBM Connections leads
the market, not Yammer.

Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, JIVE, Tibco, VMWare etc. etc. etc. make competing
products.

~~~
reagan83
The IDC analysis report was based on market share of revenue, which placed IBM
at the top of the list because IBM has done a great job finding customers to
buy their product for more money than Jive & Yammer (aka: Microsoft).

Because social products are much more about engagement and usage vs sales, it
would be applicable for IDC to include that metric and weight it heavily in
rankings of social enterprise software packages.

------
cordite
I did not know much about Yammer before this. As I looked it up, Microsoft is
a parent company, so it makes sense that Yammer comes with Office 365
integration.

Reminds me a lot of the (buggy, modular, quirky) PHPFox (recently changed
ownership name to moxi)

~~~
buro9
Yammer appeared as a "Twitter within your organisation" solution that was
basically free for individuals to use. Staff would sign up their team, and
then use it like Twitter to keep their team up to date with whatever they were
working on.

The money comes in when a team member leaves... as individuals sign up, the
company had no means to deny the individual access to these little spaces. So
the company would purchase some plan or other, and be able to manage
enterprise access. As someone who used Yammer in the early days, this felt
like an extortion play.

It was years before Microsoft purchased them, and somewhere around this time
they had moved from short statuses to longer posts and various groups, files,
etc... a real-time team collaboration space based around a stream of messages
that started to look like "Facebook within your organisation". In many ways
Yammer became what SharePoint should have been for the collaboration features.

That's the v. brief history of Yammer.

------
hawkice
The major problems with email are over-communication and a lack of contextual
priority. Facebook, of all companies, seems most likely to make these problems
substantially worse.

~~~
001sky
The way some corporate IP and Privacy policies are worded this would be
something as an employee to avoid. The last thing you want to do is co-mingle
behavioural information between work and personal/business.

------
Darshu
According to TC it's not yet clear if it's going to be a competitor to Yammer
/ Slack or to LinkedIn.

Either way, for a real collaboration tool that's more than a place to chat,
and that has beautiful UI and is used by Uber and Fiverr and other cool
startups with names ending with "er", try
[http://dapulse.com/](http://dapulse.com/)

------
ihsw
Yet another reason to avoid Facebook.

One has to wonder whether we will be doing our timesheet tracking/payroll in
Facebook instead of $MISC_HR_SOLUTION.

------
joeevans
Oh crap. First google+, now facebook? I hate employers making me use these
horrible things. I'm now going to avoid working for companies that do.

> Facebook only knows what you tell it.

Facebook collects lots of information on you if you're a member or not, and
much more than you tell it. Don't believe me? Search on those keywords.

~~~
joeevans
I realize talk is cheap... here's a link:

[http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/facebook-finally-
adm...](http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/facebook-finally-admits-to-
tracking-non-users-208996.html)

------
AznHisoka
Facebook should build a social CRM.

Facebook should build a social analytics company, takes Hootsuite outta biz.

Facebook should build a social data company, take Gnip outta biz.

Heck, they should build a search engine (Not Graph Search, that thing is silly
hard to learn how to use)

------
alttab
Maybe not within companies, but potentially between companies. Oh wait, thats
LinkedIn.

------
tootie
[https://honey.is/](https://honey.is/) exists. It's more like reddit for work
though.

------
rffn
I thought this exists already:
[http://www.salesforce.com](http://www.salesforce.com)

------
bahman2000
yammer could use some competition

~~~
beej1981
Competition already exists. Almost every major enterprise software company
minus Oracle. Microsoft does have Yammer, but IBM has Connections, Salesforce
has Chatter, TIBCO has Tibbr. There is an independent, Jive. There are also
upstarts like Slack.

Facebook would be entering a market that is already crowded. I'm not saying
they couldn't make a big splash, only that it's not monopolized by Yammer.

If you give credence to IDC, IBM is actually the market share leader, with
Jive in the second position and Microsoft in 3rd.

------
Dewie
Your friends made you join facebook. Then your mom made you quit it. And
eventually your boss pulled you back in.

~~~
snowbirdsong
Must be a generational difference - my mom & granny are the two biggest
reasons I stay on Facebook.

~~~
laoba
Same here. Easiest way to share pics of the kids and keep them updated on our
family since we live far away. Without my family on FB I would have left a
while back.

~~~
josefresco
It's funny, to appease my Mom and others not on Facebook I setup a self-
installed WordPress site to share family content. I then notify subscribers
via email, which even these days still is an effective communication tool.

It's actually worked (although publishing to it on my part isn't consistent),
and makes me feel much better that my content is stored on my server, in a
format I control almost completely.

~~~
Loughla
I have a cousin who does that with pictures of her kid, and no one follows the
links. She receives less than two unique visitors a month at this point. Turns
out we've taught our families to be overly suspicious of 'CLICK HERE FOR XX'
advertising and e-mails that even look similar to that model.

Made me giggle quite a bit.

------
notastartup
Why are they doing this? Why haven't done this before? I feel that maybe they
bet on other things to take off which hasn't and that now they are looking to
directly take the wallet of large corporations. If they were as successful as
Google when it came to online advertisement, they shouldn't need to do this.

I take this as further cementing of the fact that they cannot give the returns
to investors that is well expected and now overdue.

