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Facebook's Slack Rival Is Coming Next Month and Will Charge Per Employee (businessinsider.com)
Facebook will be launching a business communication service dubbed Facebook at Work next month. The service will be very familiar to Slack, a popular communications app. BusinessInsider reports: The enterprise messaging platform, which is called Facebook at Work, has been in closed beta since last January. Business Insider reported in May that Facebook at Work would be made commercially available by the end of this summer or in the fall. Previous reports said Facebook planned to only charge for premium features, like integrations with third-party apps. But one company testing the service that Business Insider talked to in May said that companies would pay a per-user, per-month fee. They had been quoted a cost between $1 to $5 a user by Facebook.
Team already uses Slack -- not sure why anyone that's using something that already works well would switch. Also, I should mention that I don't have a facebook account, so would this mean I'd have to create one if, say, some team I join happens to use that crap? Boo.
Facebook at work....you know, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Or, use e-mail?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
This is not a Slack Competitor. This is a version of Facebook and the OpenGraph that is hosted in the cloud that is walled off from everyone who doesn't have the same @companyname.com email address. That is all. You are able to link your company email account to your full Facebook Profile, but that is all.
Now there will be at least two chat websites that I have zero use for.
I'll be *very* surprised if this catches on.
There are plenty of people trying to sell corporate IM solutions -- and Facebook is a late entrant in this category.
We adopted Slack and I had my doubts, initially, that it was even going to amount to much for our company. But it's proven itself to be pretty handy, largely because they gave a lot of ability to link up notifications and error messages from other applications to it, and everything put into Slack is persistent. (I can go back in a search and find a troubleshooting tip or a web URL that a co-worker mentioned months ago, if I need to.) Plus, it's cross-platform compatible with clients that work well on our iPads and iPhones, Windows PCs, Macs, etc.
Still, we're finding ourselves in a situation where we've got an IM client built into our VoIP phone system's control panel on our computers, and Slack for our departmental communications, plus all of our Mac and Windows users long ago standardizing on using AOL's AIM messenger (linkable to Apple iMessages on the Mac) and publishing a directory of all of our employee's IM names in there. We're pretty saturated on corporate chat clients.
Facebook has a relatively poor reputation in the workplace anyway, though. People consider it a time-waster and a site needing to be blocked in some instances.
Slack is huge right now in Silicon Valley. To the point that some people will consider you technologically backward if you don't have it.
I make an effort to not work with those kinds of people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Slack is almost a 3 billion dollar company based on a recent valuation.
It's pretty fancy. And with all that revenue they made something great out of what XMPP could have been.
What's that? Hawaii noises? He's banging on them bongos like a chimpanzee.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Slack is okay, but I prefer Discord. Especially for large groups that are broken into smaller teams, with fluid memberships. I can see what any team I belong to at anytime, without being inundated by messages for everything. The Voice / Chat separation is also really nice, as we can Collaborate on chat, and on voice as needed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.