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Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

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Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what's your threat model that you are worried about? I would imagine all of these companies have much better security and reliability than most internal IT departments. And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. The NSA can get what they want anyways. 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 /…

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that. > The NSA can get what they want anyways. If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren…

> Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's ridiculous that a forum like this would fall for such fear mongering.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#112
post #45
post #27

Awesome, pretty soon companies wont have to store any of "their" data on their own servers. Facebook - Company info/announcements/chat OneDrive/Google/Dropbox - Company documents VOIP Services - Company communications All stored in clear-text obviously (or at least not encrypted by company using the service before transfer to said services, same thing really). I myself think this trend is hilariously ridiculous, but…

While I agree I believe that for now this is mostly the case for US-based companies. 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.

Back when I worked in law, it was the case that the EU had very strict laws regarding where (physically) you store data, and who can access the data.

That meant that EU based firms could only buy our Install-behind-your-firewall version.

Is it the same for the financial district, perhaps?

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#114
post #27

Awesome, pretty soon companies wont have to store any of "their" data on their own servers. Facebook - Company info/announcements/chat OneDrive/Google/Dropbox - Company documents VOIP Services - Company communications All stored in clear-text obviously (or at least not encrypted by company using the service before transfer to said services, same thing really). I myself think this trend is hilariously ridiculous, but…

I'm a netsec freak that doesn't have ANY social media accounts, but I can't rationalize hating on this.

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.)

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#115
post #3

Has anyone seen a work social network that wasn't a joke? We have one, and the only use is that your director/VP asks their org to follow them, and then posts various strategic stuff they want you to see. There's zero peer-to-peer usage at all.

The social network/collaboration tool we use at gigantic_company is fairly useful. However it's mostly a less-usable version of facebook with document sharing bolted on.

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.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that. > The NSA can get what they want anyways. If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren…

> Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that. I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#117
post #17

I wonder what it would take to get a passable OSS substitute to Facebook going in this space. You could host it on your own server(s) the same way you can host your own internal wiki that looks/feels just like Wikipedia. Why don't we have this already?

Is/was Wave in this space?

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

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that. > The NSA can get what they want anyways. If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren…

> Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that. I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's…

> Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails

Well, except when they do. http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

> An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds

It's more than that. For example, they also scan images to identify child porn. Or Google Buzz, which showed that they scan and track the people you contact most often, and may do undesirable things with that information, like publish it.

It's naive to expect that Google/Facebook/whatever supplier of corporate IT stuff will just serve as a wholly passive platform, especially if the service is not paid.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#119
post #3

Has anyone seen a work social network that wasn't a joke? We have one, and the only use is that your director/VP asks their org to follow them, and then posts various strategic stuff they want you to see. There's zero peer-to-peer usage at all.

Microsoft uses Yammer as its corporate social network (obviously), and it's pretty active. Since teams working on the same product are in different buildings/cities, there's a group for each product/feature/team and people ask and answer questions pretty frequently. I personally use it as a public knowledge bank to search for solutions to issues I'm having before sending out a group email.

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

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