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Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

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Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#121

Post by crdoconnor »

dcsommer wrote: post #96
crdoconnor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. This will give them an in. They can pretend to sell collaboration tools while they sneak analytics with interesting stuff on the users' personal facebook usage (and maybe browsing habits) in along with it. This won't come immediately, of course.

> I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. Why do you think that? User data is the crown jewel and competitive advantage Facebook has over other companies. It would never give up that advantage. This meme refuses to die somehow.

Selling it does not necessarily mean giving up that advantage.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#122

Post by mindcrime »

I think this could be a Good Thing for many firms, but let me add that some firms will want something more customizable, and with better support for integration with their other apps, content, events, etc. For the firms that want something that's:

a. built by a company with an enterprise focus as it's core

and

b. built with integration with your other enterprise applications as a core principle

c. is open source

Then I have another option for you.

http://fogbeam.com/products.html

http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html

https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#123

Post by mindcrime »

howeyc wrote: 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…

And then one day somebody is going to realize "F%!#, none of this stuff talks to the rest of this stuff" and the tide will shift the other way. :-)

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#124

Post by saraid216 »

epmatsw wrote: post #108
ThomPete wrote: post #69

"Lars Rasmussen, the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project, had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network, Google Wave." Lars Rasmussen was also the guy behind google maps. Seems a little unfair to set it up like the above.

Was Wave even a social network? I vaguely remember it being more like a real-time Google Docs before Google Docs went realtime.

The original vision was "email replacement".

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#125

Post by amirmc »

howeyc wrote: 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 don't think you're a shrinking minority at all, especially since the article itself mentions that people are concerned.

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/

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#126

Post by einrealist »

eldude wrote: post #22

Honestly, I don't see anything here that will make them competitive with offerings like Jive Software, currently being used by the majority of Fortune 500s and more SV companies than you'd think. https://www.jivesoftware.com

Most important: I can run Jive in my own IT environment. At least I can defend myself from espionage.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#127

Post by einrealist »

beachstartup wrote: post #65
JetSpiegel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, third parties may want your data, and the solution is throw in the towel and just give the data pre-emptively to third parties? Gotcha.

guess what? not every company can afford or even convince the best, ereetest security professionals to work for them. most companies can't even configure their printers correctly, how do you expect them to harden their public facing servers? you live in hackerland, and not reality.

This is a bad excuse. So a printer leaks information to the internet and that's why I should leak all information to Facebook? Try to convince an CIO with that.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#128

Post by einrealist »

untog wrote: post #63
JetSpiegel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, third parties may want your data, and the solution is throw in the towel and just give the data pre-emptively to third parties? Gotcha.

No. Illegitimate third parties, such as criminals, want your data. So you throw in the towel and give your data to legitimate third party companies that you have signed privacy and service contracts with. They're really not comparable.

If you own the network, you can at least monitor access violations.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#129

Post by einrealist »

berberous wrote: post #50
howeyc wrote: 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…

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 /…

If don't own the pipe, then you don't own the data.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#130

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

the_hangman wrote: post #111
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd wrote: post #80

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…

I'd change that 'read' to 'scan' but I can't anymore. I really don't care about that particular phrasing. Not being a native speaker I don't think I'm even qualified to argue the semantics of the word 'read' and whether it can be applied to an algorithm or not.

I was trying to point out that some level of snooping by the cloud providers themselves is going on right now. Note that I tried to defend Google's behavior by saying that it is no secret and people are opting into it willfully.

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