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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.
Facebook at work....you know, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.