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Facebook Launches 'Workplace' So You Can Use Facebook At Work For Work (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook's business platform will get an official pricing structure and a new name, Workplace by Facebook, on Monday. The service, a Facebook-hosted office communication tool, has been in the works for more than two years under the name Facebook at Work, but now the company says its enterprise product is ready for primetime. The platform will be sold to businesses on a per-user basis, according to the company: after a three-month trial period, Facebook will charge $3 apiece per employee per month up to 1,000 employees, $2 for every employee beyond up to 10,000 users, and $1 for every employee over that. Workplace links together personal profiles separate from users' normal Facebook accounts and is invisible to anyone outside the office. For joint ventures, accounts can be linked across businesses so that groups of employees from both companies can collaborate. Currently, businesses using Workplace include Starbucks and Booking.com as well as Norwegian telecoms giant Telenor ASA and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Facebook has said it will eventually require for-profit businesses who helped to test the service to pay for it, but it has not picked a date when those businesses' free service will end. Nonprofits such as Oxfam and Save the Children, as well as educational institutions, will continue to use the service at no cost. "We've been amazed by the breadth of organizations who've embraced Workplace -- from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches," the company said in its blog post.
Fuck Facebook, I sure as hell won't use this at work. I'd rather quit.
Also, ZuckerTurd is a bit late to the party here and showing up in a gown made of shot smeared condomS
And all other waste of time sites - like eBay, Amazon, reddit, etc .....
Cat videos at work!
Just no. Fuck no!
pay a dividend instead
love is just extroverted narcissism
Facebook for work. bwahahahahaha
If this is heap of money-sucking, time-wasting garbage is what finally launches the telecommuting revolution and causes everyone to "understand" networked collaboration, there is a real non-zero chance I will go completely mad.
"We've been amazed by the breadth of organizations who've embraced Workplace -- from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches,"
Which shipping company? Which bank? I want to short their stock. Connect with live video? Srsly? How long have Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts been around? Faxes and newsletters? What century are these companies living in?
I should probably short Facebook too while I'm at it.
Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! No Flash necessary and runs on all devices.
Just nope. Fuck nope!
Why would anyone want their business and/or customer information exposed to Facebook's systems?
to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches,
I hope that bank isn't sending customer financial information in those updates.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Am I the only cynic who's convinced the only reason Facebook did this was to get Facebook in general cleared past corporate firewalls? I haven't seen the url's that Workplaces uses but I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of overlap.
My sources informed that pornhub announced opening a work-friendly porn site, ArbeitPlatz.
They offer video conferences, performance testing, and manual inspections for the first company to participate.
Wall street has shown a rapid rise of interest, predicted to be followed by a certain numbness.
You want your boss knowing how you friends are politically aligned? They already want to suggest how you vote, soon they will be suggesting you suggest to your friends how to vote...
You know they'll datamine the hell out of this. The resulting.... outsider trading with insider knowledge will be astounding. Oh, that sounds awesome, no patent on it yet? I'll put a team of people on inventing this before you. This sounds like a total disaster for any corporation.
Posting AC duh.
My company has been using this for a while now. The upper management all claim to love it. The people who don't understand good web forums, good email usage, etc, love it too; the people with more procedural jobs and less tech knowledge. The people who know how to use email, search mailing lists, etc, think it's crap. Most of IT hate it. So let's compare FB@Work with FB@Home (the one you all know). Many people think it replaces email, which is deluded.
So the good:
Threaded comments
Easy image inlining
OK mobile app
Reasonable search facility (unlike FB@home where you can't find anything later unless you bookmarked it)
If you can get it working, Social Fixer does fix some things on it, it's the same style sheets and JS as FB@Home.
You're paying, so you're not the product being sold any more.
No advertisements (unless your company puts internal stuff, like safety reminder notices or whatever).
The bad:
You have to click many times to read a full set of comments to a post, just like FB@Home. Being treated like a source of click revenue is really annoying.
It's aimed at a single stream of posts. It's hard to filter, there are no user filters (only reading each group at once).
It's hard to save any categories of stuff you like.
People think it's Facebook so they lose all self control and post any random crap that crosses their mind. So your post feed is a mixture of drivel and important things and you can't sort/search/scan easily to find that. You'll miss the quarterly department work priorities announcement between people's cat pictures and selfies doing something cool with a client.
Now way to get data out.
No choice of client, of course - FB web or FB app, no RSS feed or anything like that. You can be emailed comments if you like, like FB@home, but that's it.
The feed goes back about 10 days. Take a fortnight off? You're hosed, you'll never see the things you missed.
There's no way to see "posts in order since I last looked", your last read is not saved. You just have to go back until you get deja vu and realise you read all this already.
Posters expect everyone relevant to it sees their posts. Like FB@Home that doesn't happen, so communication is fragmented. Don't send out major reorg announcements with this, 'cos some people will miss them.
The layout design is fixed, narrow, width. If you have a wide screen you still have to scroll as much as someone on a tiny laptop. It's idiotic.
All your company data now belongs to Facebook and gets sent to the USA.
It's way more effort to read than a decent email setup most of the time, though the comments-with-posting is useful. I frankly think an old- style USENET server would be better (with a web frontend for the under-30s of course). Because it's so much effort to read, and check you haven't missed anything, it's a complete time sink.
The sneaky:
The design is just like FB@Home. Unlikely anyone walking near your computer would spot you were on FB@home wasting time. Have the FB@Work tab by FB@Home and change fast.
Overall the interface is pretty sucky and Facebook haven't got their heads out of their backsides for this any more than FB@Home.
SLACK owns this market right now... Looks like Facebook is getting too slow in it's old age.
for how long it will be before the Yo Dawg, I saw you like to Facebook meme comes out?
Or worse, they create a Facebook for Facebook.
Normally, I wouldn't suggest something so stupid but 2016 has taught me that stupid just seems to happen and more often than I'd like.
In fact, unlike Russia, they spy on you even when they don't have to, because in FB Workplace, you must be guilty of thoughtcrimes or you wouldn't be working in a place with FB Workplace.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just think of how FB mines your FB page for data. Now think how it will mine your work FB page for data. You really think intelligent (yes, I had to preface what I'm about to say with that word) Cxx's will in any way let that into their company?
// zuckerberg can zuck off
/ don't have a FB page
Disclaimer: I work at Facebook but I'm not in any way involved with this product. I just use it internally.
It just basically lets you use Facebook groups and messenger within your company (and the other stuff like newsfeed and notes and photos, but I don't need that). It doesn't tie to your Facebook account beyond a one-time import of your name and profile picture. I prefer it to Slack for some use cases, because you can have posts and comments within groups, and you can choose which groups to get notifications for, and it's easier to search than in Slack. Messenger tends to be a great way of pinging coworkers, and you can just not check it or turn it off when you don't want to be disturbed. You can also upload a set of slides to a post, another handy use case. It's also completely separate from my personal Facebook, no posts or friends bleed through between the two, which is exactly how I want it.
Yo dawg, I heard you like Facebook at Work, so we put a Facebook at Work in your Facebook at work so you can Facebook at Work while you Facebook at work.
Nothing posted to
Okay, everyone here is bitching about the usual privacy and other crap like that. So, I'll take this in a different direction...
Name one... only ONE feature that Facebook for Workplaces has over traditional Facebook? I've been following this thing since it was announced, and have yet to see a single thing this does which normal Facebook does not do. It has the EXACT same messaging system, EXACT same groups system, and the EXACT same layout and management for groups/messages. The only differences I've been able to find thusfar is a) the "name", b) the title bar is a different color (WWWOOO!!!), and c) it is a "secondary" account, separate from your main account.
So this is basically FB telling people "hey, we don't authorize individuals to have two accounts at once... but... uuhhh... have a second account now, but with a new hat!"
I was just complaining about an earlier news item posted on Slashdot for a Facebook corporate chat client they were apparently going to sell as competition to apps like Slack chat. And now THIS?
I'm even a regular Facebook user and I have to say I hope this thing crashes and burns!
There are SO many options out there to handle "internal social media". Where I work, we've been using Salesforce "Chatter" for this stuff for years.
WHY would anyone decide Facebook is the optimal thing to re-purpose as an Intranet site of sorts, for employees to share content?
Again, they're very late to the party and offering something that nobody should really need - hoping your company buys it anyway based on the familiar branding alone.
Industrial espionage has a new name lol...
All your employer's data are belong to us. Muhahahaha!
Requiem for the American Dream
you, insensitive clod! And neither friends, so I can't use the other Facebook.
Any responsible business owner/exec installing this in their business needs to be taken out to the woodshed.
Uh, LinkedIn is already doing that. Duh!
Very pointless in the workplace, just used for masturbatory/motivational posts by senior execs and ass kissing by everyone else, not a very good productivity tool
There are many social platforms available for the enterprise like Jive, Yammer (now part of Microsoft Office 365), Hangouts and now Workplace by Facebook – but all these channels eventually become noisy, employees lose interest (there is no incentive for them to use the platforms) and HR / Internal Marketing can’t seem to get their message across consistently nor are they able to address employee needs properly. Haven’t you seen that with your Facebook feeds already? If you are looking for a metrics driven employee communication and engagement platform, pick one that provides two way communication with you having control over the targeting, makes content fun, and helps you provide incentives for employees to be engaged. Read more here - http://www.hubengage.com/is-workplace-by-facebook-right-for-your-company-alternatives-comparison-employee-mobile-communication-platforms