Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#41

Post by tomschlick » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

glitchinc wrote: post #13

diverightin63 wrote: post #7

I feel bad for Yammer.

My first thought was, "So Facebook released Yammer?" But after some thought... It will be interesting to see how this will be differentiated from Yammer. Yammer may actually benefit from this ... companies that are considering workplace social networks may evaluate all options, and then realize that Yammer has been out for quite some time and touts over 200,000 corporate customers. Many companies have Facebook restri…

I could see FB creating a "whitelistable" domain where you can only access @Work stuff so that enterprises would be happier to use FB@Work. Something like work.facebook.com

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#42

Post by kyllo » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #21

kyllo wrote: 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?

Can you not do that with Diaspora?

Maybe you can. I guess I should look into that. Perhaps Friendica as well.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#43

Post by crdoconnor » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

jcfrei wrote: post #4

ckluis wrote: post #2

I wonder if they might put it on a subdomain. Facebook is blocked at my company. That might make using Facebook@Work a little harder.

Maybe that's the point. They noticed declining traffic during work hours and try to reestablish their access to bored employees at work by essentially forcing IT admins to unblock the facebook domain.

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.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#44

Post by rondon2 » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

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…

It is just so expensive to provide 99% uptime on your own servers. Who is going to go into the office at 2:00AM when an executive can't access his power point presentation?

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#45

Post by koyote » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:32 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#46

Post by pearjuice » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

And here comes highly personalized B2B advertising. Smart move, if you ask me. Wonder why they limit themselves to relatively large sized companies.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#47

Post by arthurcolle » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:37 PM UTC

This is going to destroy Slack

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#48

Post by antsar » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:40 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #5

I wonder what guarantees on data confidentiality will be offered? Facebook doesn't have a good reputation when it comes to privacy. I do not believe any serious workplace will trust them with handling any company data and IP.

The same way that no serious workplace trusts Google/Dropbox with handling any company data and IP today, right?

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#49

Post by jkaptur » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

"Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time." Wow, that's really different from what I expected.

Re: Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

#50

Post by berberous » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

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 / security / reliability issues. Other industries, like law, should obviously avoid such services.