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techcrunch.com 2015 0000625.txt

#Facebook Unveils Facebook At work Lets Businesses Create Their Own Social networks About six months ago we reported that Facebook was working on a new product aimed squarely at the enterprise market under the working title B@Work . Now that product is officially coming to light: today the company is launching new ios and Android apps called acebook At Workalong with a version of Facebook At work accessible via its main website which will let businesses create their own social networks amongst their employees that are built to look and act like Facebook itself. Facebook At work is now available for download on ios and wel update with a links to the Andriod version once it live though both are usable via a limited pilot to start with. Check out Josh follow-up story for more screenshots details on privacy and analysis.)Employers can create separate logins for employees to use with their Work accounts or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place. The product puts Facebook head-to-head with the likes of Microsoft Yammer Slack Convo Socialcast and a huge number of others who are trying to tackle the nterprise social networkspace. Even Linkedin conveniently let drop last night that it too was looking at building a product for coworkers to communicate and share content (but not chat as a Linkedin spokesperson tells me). Not all of these have been a hit: 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. Facebook is positioning today debut as a bold first step. ee putting the app into the app stores so that we can begin testing the productasmussen said in an interview. In fact Facebook has already been running tests of the service with very small setof external businesses around the world Rasmussen says; this is the next step in that process. The aim initially will be companies with 100 or more employees. In fact the existing Facebook Groups product is used already by smaller organisations. Because of the early nature of the product there are a lot of questions in the air. The company has yet to work out for example how it might price the app whether it will monetise the service through ads or how third-party apps will work. For now Facebook Platform has been disabled on the Work product meaning no ads or apps. That may not always be the case (t could be paidhe says. This beta state of affairs is in some ways ironic. Rasmussen says that Facebook has effectively been working on Work for the last 10 years because it is based on what Facebook own employees have been using to communicate with each other pass on news plan meetings and share documents. That long-time use and Facebook familiarity to all of us are part of what makes Facebook confident that it can carve a place for itself in a market that already is crowded very. acebook At work strength is spent that wee ten years and incorporated feedback from 1 billion active usershe says. ll embedded of that is now in the same product but adapted for different use cases. nd it actually used by staff hen Mark Zuckerberg the CEO makes an announcement he just posts it on Facebook at Workrasmussen says. In fact Facebook own popularity could be Facebook At work biggest advantage. A lot of efforts in offices to get employees to collaborate more with each other have been stymied because employees don want to use the software. It yet another new thing to learn and doesn feel essential. A lot of messaging apps (Microsoft Yammer being one of the notably early movers) have tried to tap into onsumerizationor getting enterprise apps to look and feel more like consumer apps to encourage usage. In that vein Facebook At work built essentially on Facebook itself will be arguably the closest of all to an authentic onsumersocial experience. Here a run-down of some of the key points about the service as told to me by Rasmussen: Pricing. As noted above no firm details on this yet but consider that most of the other apps offer tiers of pricing. By making this free Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network. The fact that Rasmussen would not rule out advertising as an option down the road to me suggests that Facebook could consider tiers of its own where some businesses may pay for the product and have it ad-free while others might take it free and get ads. Again most enterprise apps are paid based on a model so it probably more likely to remain the case here too. Plus this would give Facebook another revenue stream beyond ads and app-related payments. How it will work Facebook wouldn show me a demo ahead of the launch but this is how Rasmussen describes it: hen an employer adopts Facebook At work they can construct it with a set of new accounts. Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time. his would work much like Groups and public profiles do today. On mobile you would have two mobile apps running at the same time he adds. ven if the employee chooses to link there is no crossover. The content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook. hat not there/integrations. You can share documents today but for now there will be no in-app editing urrently. gain that leaves this open as something that will come down the line. he set of features are identitcal to personal Facebook but just to get it out sooner wee disabled the Platform so the APIS that third parties work with are not there but we are keen to turn it back on. Hopefully in the future other enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook At work. ackstory on development. Back in June I deduced that Facebook At work was connected with Rasmussen work in London but what I found out from sources after that report was that this was more than casual: this was his baby. Rasmussen is not shy to bring this up himself (which I have to admit is refreshing to hear because people do like to posture a lot in tech don they). can say that the challenges of making work more efficient is something that has been on my mind for a long time and I come to it with a lot of passion and the knowledge of a failure of doing this at a different companyhe says referring of course to Google Wave. thought that maybe Facebook experience was what was needed. When I worked on search here it was always at the back of my mind so later I picked back up on that idea joined in on the conversation. he caveat to all this however is one that Facebook will have to continue to grapple with all the more so as it continues to grow. Canvassing opinion on a Facebook At work product I heard not only once people shy away from the idea concerned with the thought of Facebook wningyour data and the potential lack of confidentiality resulting from it. That can be frustrating when related to pictures of you too drunk when you were in college or frankly scary looking when you were in high school but potentially very costly and illegal if proprietary work information is involved e

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