The problem with those self-hosted products is you're the person on hook to monitor, update, and maintain them. Much easier to let it be somebody else problem, especially since this stuff is like a AAA service.
I have so many things to say about this but the last time I said anything anti-F B on H N I got lawyers against me.
Please god people don't use this.
Edit:
I'm going to qualify my sentiment.
FB thinks that "making the world more connected" is a good thing (TM) -- and in an utopian sense that may be true... But FB is not utopian.
See the fucking onion article. You all know the one.
The world doesn't need to be "more connected" --- it needs to be more conscious --- and very little work by many many startups are "making the world a better place"
The fact is that the world is still just as dark as always. Slavery is up, consumption begets inequality and the worlds economies are all about consumption.
How about creating an economy based on provisioning and providing. But because fuck you, that's why, is the philos of the day.
Zuck needs to read his letter to his daughter and then read that same letter to one who has zero relation or zero connection to FB. If the only person he is committed to making the world a better place for is his child through his tax shelter, then we will truly know the morality of FB.
Because Facebook has no intention of keeping the service around if it isn't successful. Whereas with Slack, it's actually their business and already proven profitable/successful.
That logic makes zero sense. "Success" and profitability are only states, you aren't guaranteed either forever. Just as Slack took time to establish both — time which Facebook will also need to establish them both for themselves.
I've been down voted on here for an anti FB post before. And I wasn't even saying anything that contentious. I have since stopped using Facebook because of all the regurgitated noise that appears in my timeline.
It's segmented with two accounts. An FB@Work account and your regular FB account.
Basically, everything at FB is run through FB. (e.g. Groups for everything!) Someone decided that because FB loves FB so much, and a billion people use it, others would want to run their business through FB as well. Now that there's post and comment search, it's not useless as a repository of knowledge, but at the same time I have a hard time believing that others will love FB@Work as much as FB loves FB@Work.
I clicked this hopeful that Facebook had made a new product tailored to the needs of an office. Instead it seems like they recently decided that their existing product just happens to already be the perfect product for the office and rebranded it.
I don't buy this at all, teams don't actually collaborate by sending each other green giraffe stickers.
To clarify it's not that emoticons can't be part of how people communicate at work. I just couldn't really believe those exchanges they were showing there. Slack puts the whole conversation right in front of you and makes link and searching really comfortable. The fb share box really isn't meant for that.
Maybe they killed Parse because it wasn't all about keeping people in their walled garden, and enabled people to duplicate features of facebook. It could be in line with what they did with FBML & facebook apps.
In fact, this would actually force people to block FB. The worst thing to happen would be for someone to post important information related to company on their personal feed by mistake. If they can login to both the accounts, this is very much possible. Unless, of course, FB for work looks dramatically different from original FB. I don't know, I never tried.
I work for a Large Corp., and FB is not blocked. What is blocked are services like dropbox or google drive. But I can't imagine the security department would allow publishing work-related information to other company cloud.
This seems like the kind of safe and boring product you'd make while trying not to get fired before your options vest. As they'd say in the wine industry, "it's well made."
They're probably thinking that since so many people are familiar with facebook's UX, it can become the baseline for an office collaboration tool (one with a very small learning curve).
There's no mandate in my company that users stick with Google Apps for calendars, groups, document sharing, etc. But any department that went with their own tool for any of that would be their Island that wouldn't interoperate with the rest of the office.
That doesn't mean that Google Apps is the best tool, or even that it works well for everyone, but it means that people are willing to put up with a less than perfect solution that's integrated with the rest of the company.
I'd argue that they consciously make it work for them internally, despite lots of pain points solved by other tools better suited for the job.
For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working. Similarly, Facebook's group chat isn't the best archival tool, nor does it support features like merging posts or transferring them from one group to another.
If they turned that version into a service that could run on-premises, inside a company's network, then I think they could have a real chance at becoming the communication and coordination medium for most companies.
> For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working.
He does; he’s a bit of an outlier in how he can handle intense communications, but Messenger at his scale is not less manageable than e-mail — it mainly encourages extreme brevity.
The information filtering is done using groups and notification that allow everyone to target their attention; his is focused on high-level groups that distill details from other working groups.
I can see that working wonderfully for Facebook, because it's all internal. But other companies can't really do that, because it's not okay for most other employees at most other companies to do all of their work-related coordination through a third-party.
You're right, teams don't collaborate by sending each other green giraffe stickers. I don't know how you got that idea in the first place. If your team only sends green giraffe stickers to each, you should probably leave your company.
A lot of companies use Booster or Yammer, so there is already a market for that.
It can be interesting to share some technical news or to organize social events (pizza day for the office, hiking week-end). It can be a nice additional source of revenue for Facebook.
People collaborate using stickers (or memes) quite intensively in the last… three companies I worked for (very different from each other).
Some are casual references to insiders jokes, but all were generally clear enough to get the point across and funny enough to soften the blow of disagreeing. Positive reactions with the humour or intensity of an over-excited gif are great to convey not just a green light, but support from higher-ups.
There was a clear bias towards younger people in using those appropriately and consistently.
Yes it's bad grammar but I'm pretty sure the phrasing is intentional. They're using an anthropomorphism, a common UX trend these days.
Apple uses it in all their iPad and iPhone ads (e.g. Do more with iPhone). A while back a reporter called out Apple on their un-grammatical naming and an exec justified it saying that leaving out the "a/an/the" on their products made them seem more alive and less replaceable. It shows there's a deeper connection to the product and Apple wants to convey that message to their customers.
I don't see a clear answer on whether or not Facebook will analyze or use the data in any way. It is said that a company can "control" the data, but I'd like to know how Facebook will handle the data.
I will not use a product supported by advertising for internal communication.
The demographic data they would mine would be invaluable to them, but for a company would be unconscionable to give to a third party. Especially one so historically lax about privacy.
You can mine my social life all you want, but when it comes to business, get the hell away.
Facebook at Work isn't going to be free. I also highly doubt they'll be touching any of the FB@Work data for mining, just like Google Apps for Business doesn't mine business accounts or serve ads.
So is this supposed to be an alternative to Yammer? Because that thing is terrible. Not just the implementation, but the very idea. Normal Facebook at least has some element of fun to it.
What's the purpose of the same thing, but for work? To share a bunch of the same "professional" garbage that people share on LinkedIn and maybe try to look smart in front of the boss?
Seriously, who actually wants to use something like this?
As @voynich61 has mentioned, there's something incredibly morally murky about this product.
The first thing that came to my head is stalking. Before Facebook "Work", the workplace was relatively safe. As long as you don't provide any info, such as phone numbers, personal email address, and had some pretty good privacy settings, you could deflect some potential stalkers at work.
For the sake of the argument, I'm going to assume that with Facebook Work, you login with your normal Facebook account, because, you know, ease of signing up, etc. And I'm going to further assume that this "work" thing will also make a copy of your profile picture, bio details, etc.
With all this information, it's not going to be hard for co-workers to start harassing you online. And since it's the same workplace, you'll soon have to rebuffing them both offline and online.
Additionally, employers will easily find your personal information, such as things you did on the weekend, embarrassing photos that shouldn't be shared around the workplace, etc.
While I sort-of (not really) congratulate Facebook on trying out some new moves, there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed, and lately, Facebook has been crossing all of them. Free Basics, is the latest example that comes to mind. I know in the past Facebook has had a "hacker" mentality when making new products, but for a company as big as Facebook, I wish they gave their products a bit more thought before attempting them.
That was my thought too - with all of the implied harassment, offline bullying, sleuthing and shaming going on perhaps there are grander issues than Facebook launching a corporate product.
it says in like 15 different places on the page that you create a new account, you sign up with your business email, and while the interface is similar to the personal version of facebook, it's completely separate. My guess is you didn't read any of the linked page other than perhaps the title.
I'm pretty sure this is going to be big. I think Slack is so successful not just because of the chat interface and the integrations, but because people reliably receive notifications, messages can contain attachments that are presented in a helpful way, and because it has good ways of organizing groups. Facebook has everything but the chat interface and the integrations. I don't see any reason for them not to add these.
You know what gives me reliable notifications? You know what lets me view my attachments in whatever way I want? You know what lets me organize/tag/correlate my messages the way I want?
OMG ITS EMAIL.
In 3 years everything is going to bitch about IM the same way they bitch about email. And they're the ones that asked for it.
I take it you've never used Yammer, which was created as "Facebook for work" seven years ago. The Yammer news feed is actually a great way to stay generally aware of what's going on in your company across lots of different groups or functions. I'm an engineer and its nice to see what sales and customer support are worried about from time to time and occasionally chimein when I can be helpful. At my company we use chat for quick, immediate conversations, and Yammer for bigger, more in depth conversations about product or architecture or various business tactics.
I imagine Facebook for Work would happily fill a very similar role to Yammer, sitting comfortably alongside chat. Of course, they'll probably have a much easier time with distribution given the brand recognition.
When the first rolled it out and signed everyone up at my office people complained all the time about the spam in their mailboxes. Then we figured out how to delete our accounts. Now the only people who use it are those that are trying to impress someone by giving the image of participation.
I imagine it has its own appeal as most people in non-tech industries where Slack is unheard of understand Facebook. Plus it has the double whammy of servicing linkedin-like features. The video shows a fabric company if that says anything about who they're targeting. I don't think the HN crowd is who they're after.
Yes, what stood out to me in the OP video is it is targeted to normals. Whereas Slack has a startup/tech following.
Also, FB for Work has the biggest advantage from an Enterprise Software ever: they've already pre-trained 2 billion of the world's population on how to use it via the consumer version. Why not take advantage of that?
I agree! Although, I am curious about some of the privacy concerns that are being raised.
To further your point, I think Facebook's timeline dynamic complements Slack quite nicely. Slack is great for broad, real-time communication, whereas Facebook posts can be much more hyper-focused and the conversation can revolve around the specific topic over a long period of time.
For example, we have a development channel in our Slack. I can go back and browse through the chat log, but it's awkward to contribute a suggestion or thought to a conversation that happened yesterday. Everyone has moved on. Not the case on FB.
I'm not too familiar Google Wave. I was thinking about it a bit more before I went to bed last night, and the internet has always had chat and message-board style communication. They've always been complementary.
Slack _could_ try to tackle this, but I feel like it would need to be a different format than the chat room and it would be moving away from their strength.
I thought this was new, but apparently they announced working on it around June 2014 and even had the apps around since early 2015 which would explain how the Google Play app already has 60k reviews... Discovered this while looking for comparisons to Salesforce's Chatter: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebookwork-vs-salesforce-ch...
All of the use cases for this, Slack more or less solves, which Events being a Slack integration away.
That being said, outside of the HN Community and outside of Tech savvy companies who know and prefer Slack, it's not completely useless. It's sure as hell better than Email groups and Calendar events in my opinion.
All of the use cases for this, Slack more or less solves, which Events being a Slack integration away.
That being said, outside of the HN Community and outside of Tech savvy companies who know and prefer Slack, it's not completely useless. It's sure as hell better than Email groups and Calendar events in my opinion.
Social vs Work, which one should we be more serious? Can they work together? I think probably not. Work productivity will decrease dramatically if we shift our focus to social.
303 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadIf I‘m using this as a regular workflow, I want to know that it won‘t go away one day.
I have so many things to say about this but the last time I said anything anti-F B on H N I got lawyers against me.
Please god people don't use this.
Edit:
I'm going to qualify my sentiment.
FB thinks that "making the world more connected" is a good thing (TM) -- and in an utopian sense that may be true... But FB is not utopian.
See the fucking onion article. You all know the one.
The world doesn't need to be "more connected" --- it needs to be more conscious --- and very little work by many many startups are "making the world a better place"
The fact is that the world is still just as dark as always. Slavery is up, consumption begets inequality and the worlds economies are all about consumption.
How about creating an economy based on provisioning and providing. But because fuck you, that's why, is the philos of the day.
Zuck needs to read his letter to his daughter and then read that same letter to one who has zero relation or zero connection to FB. If the only person he is committed to making the world a better place for is his child through his tax shelter, then we will truly know the morality of FB.
Good fucking luck.
/rant
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/fcebook-cia-onion/
Basically, everything at FB is run through FB. (e.g. Groups for everything!) Someone decided that because FB loves FB so much, and a billion people use it, others would want to run their business through FB as well. Now that there's post and comment search, it's not useless as a repository of knowledge, but at the same time I have a hard time believing that others will love FB@Work as much as FB loves FB@Work.
I don't buy this at all, teams don't actually collaborate by sending each other green giraffe stickers.
The business functionality has already existed (since FB uses its own platform internally), so its comparatively minor in engineering effort.
No seriously, that's pretty brilliant.
That doesn't mean that Google Apps is the best tool, or even that it works well for everyone, but it means that people are willing to put up with a less than perfect solution that's integrated with the rest of the company.
Of course in the above FB scenario this is not a problem because they're the vendor.
For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working. Similarly, Facebook's group chat isn't the best archival tool, nor does it support features like merging posts or transferring them from one group to another.
He does; he’s a bit of an outlier in how he can handle intense communications, but Messenger at his scale is not less manageable than e-mail — it mainly encourages extreme brevity.
The information filtering is done using groups and notification that allow everyone to target their attention; his is focused on high-level groups that distill details from other working groups.
It actually is. The vast majority of essential information is in there; HR tools, some IT stuff is based on integration with the Facebook codebase.
It can be interesting to share some technical news or to organize social events (pizza day for the office, hiking week-end). It can be a nice additional source of revenue for Facebook.
Some are casual references to insiders jokes, but all were generally clear enough to get the point across and funny enough to soften the blow of disagreeing. Positive reactions with the humour or intensity of an over-excited gif are great to convey not just a green light, but support from higher-ups.
There was a clear bias towards younger people in using those appropriately and consistently.
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/is-it-a-c...
Apple uses it in all their iPad and iPhone ads (e.g. Do more with iPhone). A while back a reporter called out Apple on their un-grammatical naming and an exec justified it saying that leaving out the "a/an/the" on their products made them seem more alive and less replaceable. It shows there's a deeper connection to the product and Apple wants to convey that message to their customers.
So yes, it's bad grammar but it's here to stay.
https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/facebook-at-work/ass... https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/facebook-at-work/ass...
Next up "Facebook staring at you watching you sleep".
The demographic data they would mine would be invaluable to them, but for a company would be unconscionable to give to a third party. Especially one so historically lax about privacy.
You can mine my social life all you want, but when it comes to business, get the hell away.
It does not.
I like it when people accidentally summarise life in 21st century capitalism on HN
What's the purpose of the same thing, but for work? To share a bunch of the same "professional" garbage that people share on LinkedIn and maybe try to look smart in front of the boss?
Seriously, who actually wants to use something like this?
Totally uninspiring. DOA.
EDIT: Seems they are using the WordPress.com VIP service. That explains that.
The first thing that came to my head is stalking. Before Facebook "Work", the workplace was relatively safe. As long as you don't provide any info, such as phone numbers, personal email address, and had some pretty good privacy settings, you could deflect some potential stalkers at work.
For the sake of the argument, I'm going to assume that with Facebook Work, you login with your normal Facebook account, because, you know, ease of signing up, etc. And I'm going to further assume that this "work" thing will also make a copy of your profile picture, bio details, etc.
With all this information, it's not going to be hard for co-workers to start harassing you online. And since it's the same workplace, you'll soon have to rebuffing them both offline and online.
Additionally, employers will easily find your personal information, such as things you did on the weekend, embarrassing photos that shouldn't be shared around the workplace, etc.
While I sort-of (not really) congratulate Facebook on trying out some new moves, there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed, and lately, Facebook has been crossing all of them. Free Basics, is the latest example that comes to mind. I know in the past Facebook has had a "hacker" mentality when making new products, but for a company as big as Facebook, I wish they gave their products a bit more thought before attempting them.
> It's easy to get started. You just create a new Facebook at Work account to connect with coworkers.
You know what gives me reliable notifications? You know what lets me view my attachments in whatever way I want? You know what lets me organize/tag/correlate my messages the way I want?
OMG ITS EMAIL.
In 3 years everything is going to bitch about IM the same way they bitch about email. And they're the ones that asked for it.
I imagine Facebook for Work would happily fill a very similar role to Yammer, sitting comfortably alongside chat. Of course, they'll probably have a much easier time with distribution given the brand recognition.
I'm curious though, what aspects of it do you usually hear people complaining about?
Also, FB for Work has the biggest advantage from an Enterprise Software ever: they've already pre-trained 2 billion of the world's population on how to use it via the consumer version. Why not take advantage of that?
To further your point, I think Facebook's timeline dynamic complements Slack quite nicely. Slack is great for broad, real-time communication, whereas Facebook posts can be much more hyper-focused and the conversation can revolve around the specific topic over a long period of time.
For example, we have a development channel in our Slack. I can go back and browse through the chat log, but it's awkward to contribute a suggestion or thought to a conversation that happened yesterday. Everyone has moved on. Not the case on FB.
Slack _could_ try to tackle this, but I feel like it would need to be a different format than the chat room and it would be moving away from their strength.
That being said, outside of the HN Community and outside of Tech savvy companies who know and prefer Slack, it's not completely useless. It's sure as hell better than Email groups and Calendar events in my opinion.
That being said, outside of the HN Community and outside of Tech savvy companies who know and prefer Slack, it's not completely useless. It's sure as hell better than Email groups and Calendar events in my opinion.