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.

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.

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/

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.

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.)

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.

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

http://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-searc...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Doesn't look like you have to have personal account or link it.

Why would anyone already running their own communication want internal Facebook? Because email lists aren't hip enough?

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]

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

Also, I'm sure they'll produce lots of insights and make lots of mistakes I can learn from...on their dime.

Additionally, Slack now has just about the best tagline in the world: 'We're not 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.

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.