"Workplace" accounts are completely separate, with the exception of an optional link to your personal account to make it easier to log in. To my knowledge, no other data is shared. Your employer owns the data, not Facebook.
Will they support generic 2factor auth apps or will I have to use a separate Facebook workplace app to generate auth codes for logging in?
I'm already annoyed that I get my two factor codes from two different apps (one for Facebook, one for everything else), I'd be extra annoyed if it had to be three.
I dream of the day where I'm not followed around by my data exhaust. It's just wishful thinking.
I feel that the marginal benefit of social media systems has peaked. It's begun to make interactions less human and less personal; the gain over using email is negligible. I don't need to see your picture, I just want to know when I'll have VPN access.
The Workplace account exists completely separately of your private Facebook account. Can you point to specific evidence that suggests they're the same/linked or do you just "feel" like they would be?
Understanding software systems, there are any evidences that says it's separated? They use data from instagram and whatsapp, which they still call different companies. What would make us believe they aren't going to exploit it the same way they already do?
Companies probably wouldn't allow it in if it involved being distracted by your social "circle". That's why it doesn't. It's a completely separate account.
I find it hard to believe that people believe Slack started the trend. There have been countless such services in the past. Back in the terrible dark ages of the internet, pre-2000, we used AIM to have those type of discussions. Was very valuable as we had development teams all over the country and was a quick way to determine who the expert was for a given question and get them into a conversation. If it was too cumbersome to hash out with them via messaging we would, god forbid, pick up the phone and have a chat.
People in "normal" non-techy workplaces are aware of and interested in Slack. Mainstream workplace group messaging in these sorts of organizations (which make up a lot more of the economy than the ones in our bubble) is a fairly new trend, which Slack deserves a lot of credit for.
This is a common mistake - the existence of technology is not the same as mainstream adoption.
An horrifically cluttered UI, but having evaluated many of these workplace collabortaion tools in the past it's actually pretty par for the course. For some reason our HR partners always wanted everything on one page, like a massive disfunctional sci-fi spacecraft dashboard with lights flashing everywhere.
So now employers are being told to have their employees put business data (potentially even sensitive or secret) on US servers that are "owned" by the US government (see PRISM, etc.), while everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country.
Considering that the door was wide open with Google Docs (err, Suite), Microsoft Office 365, respective e-mail offerings (Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook), Yammer, Github, Box, Dropbox and Slack, I don't know if "now" is an appropriate term to use.
> everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country.
I didn't know that, can you give some examples of this?
I heard about the US government making a WTO claim over bribery by Airbus in Saudi Arabia ostensibly discovered by electronic surveillance (not PRISM-related), but this is in the gray area.
The American surveillance infrastructure was deployed, allegedly for corporate espionage, against targets in France [1], Germany and Brazil [2]. The IMF, the World Bank and the EU antitrust commissioner, amongst others, were likely targeted to help politically-connected companies [3].
I appreciate your links to articles about espionage activities with corporate targets. None of them mention any examples of economic benefit, due or undue.
The infamous Petrobras espionage that was implied because it appeared in a slide in a training presentation is a great example of justified espionage (if it occurred; it probably occurred). Less than 2 years later, Petrobras was implicated in massive corruption scandals involving the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff. U.S. decision makers should probably know if a trade partner and friendly nation is about to have massive political unrest due to corruption charges!
If you wish to change the subject to "economic espionage is wrong" or something like that, feel free. If so, please don't imply my assertion is incorrect. I think that is misleading.
What about FIFA? And why nobody is hearing about it anymore? All that scandal was only to pressure brazillian major media group, Globo, responsible for most of bribering in futebol. But then Globo delivered what US demanded and nobody hear about FIFA scandal anymore
The Intercept article [1] references the DNI's 2009 Quadriennial Intelligence Community review report [2] which "envisions a scenario in which companies from India and Russia work together to develop technological innovation, and the U.S. intelligence community then 'conducts cyber operations' against 'research facilities' in those countries, acquires their proprietary data, and then 'assesses whether and how its findings would be useful to U.S. industry'."
So no, we don't have a smoking gun. But we do have a powerful agency with questionable oversight which has proven its willingness to lie to Congress and documented its willingness to deploy intelligence assets in ways that prove "useful to U.S. industry".
Yeah, they're on The Guardian from when before Greenwald turned the leaks into his The Intercept venture [1]. It was one of the documents in the 2nd round of leaks about a month or so after the original PRISM and phone metadata. This presentation was the first evidence that the United States spied on State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in addition to foreign governments.
The presentation was for analyst training, and the Petrobras intrusion was nonchalantly used as an example.
If you're just getting into learning about the Snowden leaks and NSA network exploitation, I would suggest starting from the beginning in 2013, checking out the original The Guardian articles and the NYT and Washington Post ones. Der Spiegel also received one or two leaks as well; the articles were written by Jacob Appelbaum and are fairly thorough. The Guardian and Der Spiegel articles are heavily editorialized and jump to some conclusions that were later discounted, but overall the reporting is decent.
I've been so very satisfied with how much of my personal data they sell to marketers thus far, I really want them to start tracking me at work too.
Hopefully they will pair the launch with an aggressive sales campaign targeted at people in HR so I won't get a say in the matter and it'll just be rolled out for my coworkers without our input. That would be just swell.
Facebook seems like exactly the company we want to trust with SSO and performance reviews and internal corporate communications. It's coming and it's going to be amazing!
You are being manipulated constantly, 24/7. By your friends, co-workers, family, acquitances, movies, songs, books, by yourself. This isn't really a valid reason, IMO.
Considering the backlash against Slack [0], it’ll be interesting to see if Messenger’s model of more “atomic” conversations will create less interruptions. Slack (much like IRC) really contributes to an expectation of continuous conversation throughout the day/night (although not all people deal with it that way). In comparison, Messenger (and other chat apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) seem to be more designed towards short chats about specific topics, while still allowing for deeper, longer conversations (even larger groups) if needed. Could be a huge win.
Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings.
I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)?
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team.
Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?
I don't agree with that at all. I am a consultant. I see lots of companies. I see lots of companies jumping on the "plug our employees 24/7 into everything" bandwagon. Slack has a moral obligation--we all have the moral obligation--to not be the stooge of bad actors just as it works to improve the productivity of good ones. If Slack took this seriously, it would do significantly more to protect its users from toxic behavior.
For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning. This empowers assholes to be bigger assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by providing tools to be shittier; you can never not be at their beck and call; if you refuse to answer, that's you being bad and not the person who feels entitled to interrupt your life on a whim.
You also cannot mute or block users on a Slack. This disempowers people downrange of assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by not providing tools to avoid the perpetuators of shitty culture. (They have been asked for this feature and have refused.)
> For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning.
How is this any different than someone calling you at 4am? Or sending a bunch of emails? This has nothing to do with Slack and everything to do with a bad company.
The context of email, in my experience, is that "you'll get the email when you see it." Slack's ephemera, the social contract that it encourages, is "you are on all the time." It is an asynchronous communication tool that it tries to convince its users is synchronous, and if you aren't using it in a synchronous manner (as I don't, for the most part), you are breaking that perceived illusion. You are not being a Team Player.
There is a significantly different social implication to clicking the "fuck your do-not-disturb settings" link and calling you. (I would argue that the former should be worse, but it isn't, ever.) Ephemera matters. Context matter. Slack creates a bad context. They own that.
Slack's job is to make communication easier, and apparently it is doing just that based on its massive user base spike. I'm signed into 6 different Slack org's right now on my laptop to let me talk to different clients all at once and is extremely easy to use and a great timesaver.
When I leave my desk my phone gets direct messages to me that I've missed. It is incredibly useful and is doing it's job. All of the complaints above are all just deflecting your company's lack of respect for your personal time. Don't feel like being on instant messenger away from your PC? Don't install it on your phone, or turn mobile notifications off.
I've worked at previous jobs where my manager would send emails at 1AM to my BlackBerry and expect a quick response. I didn't blame BlackBerry for that, I blamed my previous management for expecting me to be online 24x7.
Agreed! Tools almost always reflect the flaws of their users — but it’s not to say that the flaws of the tool proper can’t harm a user too. In Slack’s case, I think their notification settings (and the defaults in particular) encourage an always-on culture that can be hard for some corporate cultures to resist.
Regarding public communications — I think that only aggravates the noise/always-on issue, but if that’s your think, you can of course do that on email. See examples from Stripe [0] and Buffer [1]. (Not sure if/how that scales though! Was there a follow-up from these companies?)
I agree, the defaults in Slack are too chatty. I think the web interface also does not differentiate as well between messages directed at you and message in a channel you're a part of.
My public communications preference I have based on Buffer and Stripe. It's not that everyone has to respond, but that I think that the more information everyone has the quicker they can respond to problems in the right manner.
The cure to Slack: Do NOT install slack on your phone. And if it is, remove it.
It's the hell to get notifications all day, before you're at work, after you left work. The slack dev didn't bother putting a button to stop beeping on incoming message or to stop receiving messages at all.
> I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures.
Then why are their own advertisements touting their product being used in dysfunctional ways? Doesn't that set the tone for how (and where) it will be deployed and used?
> The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)
> Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.
> Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.
Because in slack I have to check 100 inboxes full of messages not important to me rather than a single inbox with a far higher signal to noise ratio
It doesn't matter if I turn off notifications I'm still expected to know generally what's happened in my company's 100 channels.
With slack it becomes my responsibility to dig through those 100 channels. With email it's the sender's responsibility to make sure I'm on the list if they need/want my response/input and if it turns out I'm not interested I can easily mute that one thread
Bad idea. Consider how much time people/employees waste on Facebook every day. What company would encourage their users to login to Facebook during work hours? The notifications will send them to the news feed, which becomes a black hole the moment one starts scrolling down the page
Facebook
This massive social network deserves a mention on its own.
This makes up 7% of the websites accessed at work and is a
major contributor to all the wasted time in the workplace.
1. Social media sites. Not surprisingly, visiting social
media sites is the black hole of workplace productivity.
Facebook is the top social destination, with 41 percent of
survey respondents logging in from work every day. Facebook
is not the only culprit however; LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter
and more recently Pinterest all claim their share of
work-hour traffic.
I don't know. I didn't look at the design closely. I stay away from Facebook as much as possible. The more I stay away, the more things I get done in life.
They have a strong incentive to keep people on their site for as long as possible and they are extremely good at it, so I think it's a huge mistake for companies to send employees anywhere near it.
As an user of FB@W, and now Workspace, its Work Chat is largely useless. No native client, no API, the only crowd control is group.
It's just a dumbed down version of Messenger, and I don't think a team in my company want to use it, Slack is much better and worth learning. After several months we're just using it as another Viber/Whatsapp/etc..
As someone who has used Chatter since 2011, it is a half baked product at best. My daily digests are mostly junk, it has no way to filter out, Uploading images looks like you went back to '99. Try uploading multiple images to one comment. Try replying to comments to create a thread... Want to view that image someone just added, no mouse over to zoom, you must click and leave the entire page to view. The feed if expanded takes up massive real estate on the screen to the point the rest of the page is unusable. I could go on, while their Lightning is a better take on it, it will take YEARS to move the bigger companies over to the LEX as they all have custom pages and solutions developed using the old styles, plus LEX is not fully baked yet, still some features missing.
I don't get the negativity. This is kinda awesome! News feeds will be good to monitor what's going on across many groups / teams, groups can help your team post and communicate across various topics (same with messaging). Honestly the live video streams on demand is kinda huge; this isn't always something easy for companies to do especially large companies but Facebook can pull this off and make it look great for thousands of users.
Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.
It was made in London. At least until someone triggers article 50 it's more European than American :) More to your point, the article mentions getting the privacy/security certifications that companies look for. And if you're paying for the product, there's not the privacy concerns as when you are the product, etc. I'm actually impressed with this thing so far.
I am in Germany.
The NSA debacle made a lot of important people quite unhappy here, not to mention the current tensions between DBank & DOJ and so on... - so I am afraid we would interpret this a bit like Apple's labels, except in this case we would read:
Some have interpreted the DOJ fine to be a sort of retaliation for fines applied by EU to Apple/Google (especially the first for the Ireland tax rebates).
I have no particular authority in saying if this is actually the case or not, but my feeling is that in Europe (and especially in Germany) there will be a lot of resistance towards Facebook solutions (the recent Whatsapp decision to share data with the parent company is another thing that did not sit well here, for example).
Norway is one of the major beta markets and full of early adopters. Though some of the companies among them likely just want to be one of the cool kids.
But if that's possible in any way FaceBook and the company paying would be subject to breaking many corporate espionage laws in addition to destroying FaceBook's enterprise business IN ITS ENTIRETY should it be found out.
Seems like an insane amount of risk for such a very tiny reward.
This is exactly why I don't see how a company would be concerned. Lots of b2b relationships exist and are based on trust with legal ramifications for when that trust is broken.
Yet, each of the major carriers and RSA did it for the NSA in exchange for $30-(80?) million. Happened at plenty of other companies with or without nation state involvement. The big ones are still in business.
Besides, what does the EULA say on the product? Their EULA usually says something along the lines of they can do whatever they want with your data. I'm interested to see if anyone sees something similar in the enterprise agreement.
I think you have no idea how to real world works. Most of the arguments against Facebook sadly seem to be wildly out of touch with reality. Amazing that these essentially conspiracy theories are cultivated by otherwise pretty smart people - software engineers.
Except there is no evidente that anyone would care. They are sharing huge amounts of data on individuals with third parties. People continue to use and pay for the service.
Businesses have a tendency to protect themselves in a much more proactive way than individuals seem to do. Most people react when companies abuse their relationship. Businesses have IP to protect along with consider the implications for insider trading? What if a publicly trading company used this platform for their employees and conversation eluded to something which gave anyone someone at Facebook access to this information.
People don't feel comfortable sharing their pictures of cats and such but businesses have their livelihood to protect.
Real world? You must be aware of real world events in which this sort of thing really has already happened.
The ultimate arbiter is reality, and in reality this sort of thing does already happen. We could do it brazenly over the counter, or alternatively I could pay Facebook to act as a consultant; to give me their view of my market. To satisfy the legal chaps, we can just scrape the names off the data and then summarise it in a nice binder. A number of financial companies do this today. The fines are peanuts compared to the profits.
Even when it isn't company policy in some way, it is easy to bribe an employee to simply hand over a big chunk of data. The "real world" shows us that this does and will happen.
As an aside, I would suggest that the "real world" in the sense of which you are speaking doesn't even exist. Everyone, everywhere, builds their own cocoon of social mores and illusions and local conventions, and from my perspective it is you who doesn't understand it. If you're going to suggest that laws will stop it happening, I remind you that the law is whatever you can successfully negotiate and argue and persuade and influence as necessary, and big companies with deep pockets can do that very well. Some things are very hard to argue; shooting someone for no reason on live TV. Some things are eminently arguable; the Chinese wall between the data holding division and the business consultancy division. Really happening, every day, in the real world.
Its disappointing that you are trying to counter my question and keep suggesting this happens in the real world all the time with no citation to support it.
Lots of illicit things happen should we just shut down the world entirely? Cars kill people so we shouldn't approach the streets. Food can make you ill if supply chains don't handle it properly so we should stop eating.
You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works.
It's pretty well known that the Chinese walls in banks, designed to prevent some parts of the business illegally using information from other parts of the business, spent much of the approach to the 2008 financial collapse being ignored, and were often used to screw customers over for the purposes of enriching the banks. RBS just got busted for creating subsidiaries and feeding them confidential information for exactly that purpose. It was in the news in the last fortnight.
It's not at all disappointing to me to me that you bleat bullshit about "citation needed" as a defence. It's pretty expected around here; no need to actually do any work, just sit smugly pretending that you're civil and polite. Here we are engaging in yet more bullshit passive aggressiveness, each of us pretending that we're being oh-so-civil and look, look, it's the other one who's wrong, I'm just asking questions.
If you actually wanted to know, you could have found lots of examples yourself. You DON'T want to know, because this isn't about knowing anything. This is about some stranger on the internet disagreeing with your pre-formed opinions (which are pretty unusual around here, actually - the common religion here of free market fundamentalism would take it as read that FB will sell your information to your competitors) and your opportunity to posture and present yourself as reasonable.
So fuck you and fuck me, and fuck this passive-aggressive childishness that goes on around here as petty posturing from smug dickheads like you and like me. If you choose not to believe me, that's fine, but don't you dare suggest that it's my fucking job to educate you. I'm done with this passive-aggressive crap.
"You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works."
No I'm not, and you fucking know it. I'm suggesting that giving your information to FB will lead to other people getting it. That's what I'm suggesting. This junk on the end about cars killing people is your strawman attempt to smugly present yourself as some kind of adult.
Because you'd rather your work related conversations stored in Slack? Google Hangouts? Skype? GoToMeeting? There are not very many on prem solutions that are very good, so do you not use any of them or is it specifically against Facebook and if the latter why so?
It's also not very good- both the desktop and iOS clients (that I use) are horribly slow to load, clunky, and require multiple (laggy) clicks just to get to a notification of a message. I'd much rather pay for something else, on-prem and open source be damned.
The Mattermost iOS app works best on a fast connection. To accommodate slow connections, we're adding React Native (same technology as Facebook) to get competitive with Facebook's iOS app performance over time.
Overall, we created an open source, self-hosted alternative to proprietary SaaS communication for organizations that want to minimize security, lock-in, and privacy risks.
We're constantly improving, thanks to hundreds of people around the world contributing to the project.
Last time I checked, Slack's business model was not based on advertisements and they did not have an incentive to give/sell your data to third parties (I'm sorry, partners).
I see this as an interesting circle of life, which is yet to reach hardware manufacturers: the fact the real, reliable money can only come from businesses.
The money - and the attention - of the generic population is momentary.
Have you seen how many people use ad blockers? I'm finding people on Reddit and Imgur who talk about using NoScript and uMatrix! People are learning, but as with all things, it takes time.
While I appreciate being informed what does or doesn't make me a fool by internet strangers, I don't think that was the concern of the parent post. I believe their concern was that they would be seeing work related content popup while they were on their personal Facebook account thus mixing work/personal life.
I think the point of making it a completely separate account is to ease companies fears of users getting sucked into the endless scroll vortex while at work, and I would doubt they'd be jumping you back and forth and showing you notifications from personal/work Facebook when logged into either service. It would also be an obvious security/privacy issue if project info was popping up in users personal notifications.
Whether or not they are going to link the accounts on the backend for their data mining purposes, was not the intent or subject I was addressing/speculating about.
Nope, the concern of the parent post was that they would link my work and personal profiles behind the scenes. I don't want to see work-related content pop up, but it's a secondary concern. I don't want Facebook to know what I do both when I'm at work and when I'm on personal time, because I don't trust their company.
Sorry for misreading you and making assumptions. Can I ask why you are more concerned about Facebook having your workplace's information than your own personal information? Assuming that your workplace chose to offer their information up to Facebook by subscribing to their service...
I would not be concerned about them having my workplace's information if they did not have my personal information. I'm fine with them having personal information, or workplace information, but not both. The only thing missing for Facebook then would be to watch me while I sleep.
Yep. They had an automatic system for doing that in the past for people who used the product and people who didn't but were in photos uploaded by users. I still don't have a picture on Facebook with my name for that reason. They've figured out a lot about me anyway. The many mistakes are hilarious, though.
No, I'm not. But it appears that HiPPO decisions and their personal preference of Gmail over [other email software] is driving the world these days.
I'm well aware self-hosting can be hard, especially for global companies, with broad userbase, but I'm astounded how little managers and directors care about company "secrets" getting stored at providers these days.
I never thought I'm going to miss the old Microsoft, but at least those servers and services were bought and locally hosted. Sure, they may have had backdoors, but at least it was not obviously given to a company who's making their profit out of scanning contents and selling it to the highest bidder.
We don't know for sure it a paid Gmail is scannig mail or not; if a paid Dropbox is being treated the same way for, for example, "copyrighted" content the free tier is, but I would be surprised if it was completely different.
Yes, because I use Duck Duck Go for browsing and my personal emails are generally not very revealing. Google certainly has a good deal of my personal information, but I purposefully keep it limited. For that reason, I'm okay with having them as my work email provider.
I believe that is deliberate and if Facebook wants to succeed beyond tech companies, it will do well not to add any programmer-happy / commands, @usernames and single-threaded chatrooms
This is what I see groups for. Chat for small groups, Facebook groups for larger groups and long-form posts that require more in-depth discussion. This is what we do internally at Facebook and it works pretty well.
We didn't find the response time good enough compared to chat rooms and notifications were vague. Group chats being limited to 50 people was limiting for many use cases and there was no discoverability for people find chat groups since they were all private. Inviting people into group chats didn't work as well and I think there was a group chat history problem with new joiners. I'm also not quite sure if general file attachments worked.
Basically we wanted the single threaded chatroom with people mentions, we didn't want web forums which is what groups are.
If FB@Work really wants to compete, they will eventually have to make the slack/irc style rooms app. I also think you guys use IRC right?
Other people who say lack of single threaded chat rooms is a feature, not a bug smell like apple saying you don't need X until they release it themselves. You of course can 'make do' with whatever communication medium you have, but for us we found the chatroom useful. Nobody ever used FB@work, while natural adoption for slack in the corporation was very fast.
TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
>TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
Agree. I keep wondering when Google will release this Slack like chat app. We already use the other Google tools, and even Slack shells out to Hangouts for video.
Interesting, there is definitely a market for this. Some of our customers at getstream.io use the API to build their own Facebook style apps for within their organizations. Building your own in-house social networks is of course quite a bit of work. Facebook should be much easier to get up and running.
The pricing seems really low for small firms and extremely expensive for larger ones. That sounds like a challenging position for the sales team working on this project.
I wonder if this comes with the full range of personalization algorithms for the feed.
Also wonder how they will handle the extensive customization that most enterprise customers will request.
It's a solid idea though, pretty similar to what Slack is trying to achieve.
My company was part of the prerelease program and its basically just like using a more professional version of Facebook. Like linkedin but internal only.
it's actually great to have a more social way of catching up with people. The main driver for us was pulling all the 'coffee machine is broken' type emails out of our 'work system' (email) and also let people share pictures of their pets and different social events going on around the world.
Plus the advantage is that there was massive uptake super quickly since everyone already had built in knowledge of how to use it from facebook.
Plus I can say stuff on there without my parents commenting on every single post i ever make which is nice...
Previously facebook had a party line that each human had at most one facebook account (which was in contrast to its competitors where some humans had more than one account, e.g. @HistoryInPics), and creating an account required a few more hurdles than a single POST request. Now that businesses can create users it looks like that line has subtly disappeared.
If workplace takes off, I would expect faster growth in monthly active users because both the numerator will be larger and now business will be paying people to log in to facebook, and those users will also likely want to glance at their personal accounts, as well.
Plus, this move makes it harder for corporate firewalls to block facebook altogether, hits against google suite, and makes browsing facebook at work defensible... super interesting.
I think each workplace by facebook will have seperate users and separate domains, so the user-count of facebook-proper will not be affected by companies have bulk access to account creation.
This should also keep facebook proper blockable.
I didn't catch the baseball theory part of your comment advertised in the beginning.
Microsoft said that too about O365, and its true -- for Exchange and Outlook only.
The reality is that to access all O365 products, you need to have access to CDN domains and live.com authentication infrastructure, and you need to constantly monitor errors in the network because cloud scale services change IPs all of the time.
Since we're talking about communication channels, when I was first reading your comment, I read "party line" as in a shared phone line that people used in the early telephone service days. I was definitely confused. :)
This is called: despair. Lost of monthly active users, Lost of daily engagement. I bet it'll fail, although everybody automatically think that it Will suceed.
If I had, Nasdaq would crash. And Facebook will do a lot before it happens. But is a economic natural Law: what doesn't grow, shrink. Facebook reached its limits, and it was delayed a lot by Instagram and whatsapp.
Their competitor is not Slack but Salesforce. Salesforce is a leader in enterprise CRM. Facebook with apps, messenger and cloud infrastructure is way ahead on tech and usability front. This move if for getting users from entreprise.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadSee https://workplace.fb.com/trust/.
No worries, Facebook only owns the meta data it generates from your business data. /s
Maybe not now. But they have it. And correlating it would be trivial.
I'm already annoyed that I get my two factor codes from two different apps (one for Facebook, one for everything else), I'd be extra annoyed if it had to be three.
https://www.facebook.com/help/358336074294704
I feel that the marginal benefit of social media systems has peaked. It's begun to make interactions less human and less personal; the gain over using email is negligible. I don't need to see your picture, I just want to know when I'll have VPN access.
I hope the back lash is enormous. Security = Privacy = Democracy; you can't have one without the others.
Chilling effects brought on by "you should be careful what you say (and to whom)" is the death of freedom of speech, and with it "free" society.
cmd-q, alt-f4, whatever you use.
Feel free to shut down all IM when you need to focus on something.
This is a common mistake - the existence of technology is not the same as mainstream adoption.
https://fbatwork.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/workplace_3min_...
An horrifically cluttered UI, but having evaluated many of these workplace collabortaion tools in the past it's actually pretty par for the course. For some reason our HR partners always wanted everything on one page, like a massive disfunctional sci-fi spacecraft dashboard with lights flashing everywhere.
==
How much does this cost? The pricing model is based on a monthly fee per active user
How stupid do you think the rest of the world is?
Google recently bought API.ai for the exact same reason, albeit API.ai has raw data and Workplace would be companies internal interaction data.
I didn't know that, can you give some examples of this?
I heard about the US government making a WTO claim over bribery by Airbus in Saudi Arabia ostensibly discovered by electronic surveillance (not PRISM-related), but this is in the gray area.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/wikileaks-enthuellung-...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-d...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...
The infamous Petrobras espionage that was implied because it appeared in a slide in a training presentation is a great example of justified espionage (if it occurred; it probably occurred). Less than 2 years later, Petrobras was implicated in massive corruption scandals involving the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff. U.S. decision makers should probably know if a trade partner and friendly nation is about to have massive political unrest due to corruption charges!
If you wish to change the subject to "economic espionage is wrong" or something like that, feel free. If so, please don't imply my assertion is incorrect. I think that is misleading.
So no, we don't have a smoking gun. But we do have a powerful agency with questionable oversight which has proven its willingness to lie to Congress and documented its willingness to deploy intelligence assets in ways that prove "useful to U.S. industry".
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...
[2] https://theintercept.com/document/2014/09/05/quadrennial-int...
This is interesting, I hadn't heard of this, are there any links to the slide?
The presentation was for analyst training, and the Petrobras intrusion was nonchalantly used as an example.
If you're just getting into learning about the Snowden leaks and NSA network exploitation, I would suggest starting from the beginning in 2013, checking out the original The Guardian articles and the NYT and Washington Post ones. Der Spiegel also received one or two leaks as well; the articles were written by Jacob Appelbaum and are fairly thorough. The Guardian and Der Spiegel articles are heavily editorialized and jump to some conclusions that were later discounted, but overall the reporting is decent.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
I've been so very satisfied with how much of my personal data they sell to marketers thus far, I really want them to start tracking me at work too.
Hopefully they will pair the launch with an aggressive sales campaign targeted at people in HR so I won't get a say in the matter and it'll just be rolled out for my coworkers without our input. That would be just swell.
Would you like to know more?
Right now it is heavily focused on consumerism.
Facebook has already shown it is can easily identify depression, radicalization, political associations, and other "aberrant" behaviours.
I do not trust Mark Zuckerberg as an individual, nor FB as a company to fill that role in society.
Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings.
[0]: http://www.slacklash.com/
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?
For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning. This empowers assholes to be bigger assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by providing tools to be shittier; you can never not be at their beck and call; if you refuse to answer, that's you being bad and not the person who feels entitled to interrupt your life on a whim.
You also cannot mute or block users on a Slack. This disempowers people downrange of assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by not providing tools to avoid the perpetuators of shitty culture. (They have been asked for this feature and have refused.)
How is this any different than someone calling you at 4am? Or sending a bunch of emails? This has nothing to do with Slack and everything to do with a bad company.
There is a significantly different social implication to clicking the "fuck your do-not-disturb settings" link and calling you. (I would argue that the former should be worse, but it isn't, ever.) Ephemera matters. Context matter. Slack creates a bad context. They own that.
When I leave my desk my phone gets direct messages to me that I've missed. It is incredibly useful and is doing it's job. All of the complaints above are all just deflecting your company's lack of respect for your personal time. Don't feel like being on instant messenger away from your PC? Don't install it on your phone, or turn mobile notifications off.
I've worked at previous jobs where my manager would send emails at 1AM to my BlackBerry and expect a quick response. I didn't blame BlackBerry for that, I blamed my previous management for expecting me to be online 24x7.
Regarding public communications — I think that only aggravates the noise/always-on issue, but if that’s your think, you can of course do that on email. See examples from Stripe [0] and Buffer [1]. (Not sure if/how that scales though! Was there a follow-up from these companies?)
[0]: https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency
[1]: http://joel.is/how-we-handle-team-emails-at-our-startup-defa...
My public communications preference I have based on Buffer and Stripe. It's not that everyone has to respond, but that I think that the more information everyone has the quicker they can respond to problems in the right manner.
It's the hell to get notifications all day, before you're at work, after you left work. The slack dev didn't bother putting a button to stop beeping on incoming message or to stop receiving messages at all.
But, like pretty much anything, I could see it being extremely frustrating if forced on a group in an awkward way.
Then why are their own advertisements touting their product being used in dysfunctional ways? Doesn't that set the tone for how (and where) it will be deployed and used?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197449
> The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)
> Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.
> Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.
It doesn't matter if I turn off notifications I'm still expected to know generally what's happened in my company's 100 channels.
With slack it becomes my responsibility to dig through those 100 channels. With email it's the sender's responsibility to make sure I'm on the list if they need/want my response/input and if it turns out I'm not interested I can easily mute that one thread
I certainly wouldn't ever pick SF/PDT as a timezone.
I wouldn't work at a company that used Facebook as an internal communication tool, because it would encourage massive time wasting.
But still, I understand how it could encourage checking your Facebook account even more.
They have a strong incentive to keep people on their site for as long as possible and they are extremely good at it, so I think it's a huge mistake for companies to send employees anywhere near it.
It's just a dumbed down version of Messenger, and I don't think a team in my company want to use it, Slack is much better and worth learning. After several months we're just using it as another Viber/Whatsapp/etc..
Does it potentially interoperate with your company's ecosystem (suppliers, customers, partners)?
Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.
Designed in NSA - Made in UK.
I have no particular authority in saying if this is actually the case or not, but my feeling is that in Europe (and especially in Germany) there will be a lot of resistance towards Facebook solutions (the recent Whatsapp decision to share data with the parent company is another thing that did not sit well here, for example).
This, unfortunately, might get traction here as well.
really?
Take 5 minutes to think about it and see of you can't come up with a couple reasons.
Seems like an insane amount of risk for such a very tiny reward.
Besides, what does the EULA say on the product? Their EULA usually says something along the lines of they can do whatever they want with your data. I'm interested to see if anyone sees something similar in the enterprise agreement.
People don't feel comfortable sharing their pictures of cats and such but businesses have their livelihood to protect.
The ultimate arbiter is reality, and in reality this sort of thing does already happen. We could do it brazenly over the counter, or alternatively I could pay Facebook to act as a consultant; to give me their view of my market. To satisfy the legal chaps, we can just scrape the names off the data and then summarise it in a nice binder. A number of financial companies do this today. The fines are peanuts compared to the profits.
Even when it isn't company policy in some way, it is easy to bribe an employee to simply hand over a big chunk of data. The "real world" shows us that this does and will happen.
As an aside, I would suggest that the "real world" in the sense of which you are speaking doesn't even exist. Everyone, everywhere, builds their own cocoon of social mores and illusions and local conventions, and from my perspective it is you who doesn't understand it. If you're going to suggest that laws will stop it happening, I remind you that the law is whatever you can successfully negotiate and argue and persuade and influence as necessary, and big companies with deep pockets can do that very well. Some things are very hard to argue; shooting someone for no reason on live TV. Some things are eminently arguable; the Chinese wall between the data holding division and the business consultancy division. Really happening, every day, in the real world.
Lots of illicit things happen should we just shut down the world entirely? Cars kill people so we shouldn't approach the streets. Food can make you ill if supply chains don't handle it properly so we should stop eating.
You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works.
It's not at all disappointing to me to me that you bleat bullshit about "citation needed" as a defence. It's pretty expected around here; no need to actually do any work, just sit smugly pretending that you're civil and polite. Here we are engaging in yet more bullshit passive aggressiveness, each of us pretending that we're being oh-so-civil and look, look, it's the other one who's wrong, I'm just asking questions.
If you actually wanted to know, you could have found lots of examples yourself. You DON'T want to know, because this isn't about knowing anything. This is about some stranger on the internet disagreeing with your pre-formed opinions (which are pretty unusual around here, actually - the common religion here of free market fundamentalism would take it as read that FB will sell your information to your competitors) and your opportunity to posture and present yourself as reasonable.
So fuck you and fuck me, and fuck this passive-aggressive childishness that goes on around here as petty posturing from smug dickheads like you and like me. If you choose not to believe me, that's fine, but don't you dare suggest that it's my fucking job to educate you. I'm done with this passive-aggressive crap.
"You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works."
No I'm not, and you fucking know it. I'm suggesting that giving your information to FB will lead to other people getting it. That's what I'm suggesting. This junk on the end about cars killing people is your strawman attempt to smugly present yourself as some kind of adult.
Our open source community is always looking to improve and all feedback helps.
May I ask how your experience was on the web with Mattermost?
Regarding mobile performance, may I also ask what iPhone model and network speed you're using?
We publish mobile benchmarks, and I'm just wondering if your results are the same or different: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/push.html#mobile-perf...
The Mattermost iOS app works best on a fast connection. To accommodate slow connections, we're adding React Native (same technology as Facebook) to get competitive with Facebook's iOS app performance over time.
Here's the new Mattermost iOS app roadmap and backlog: http://forum.mattermost.org/t/react-native-roadmap/2339
Regarding the Mattermost desktop apps, on September 30 we had one of our largest product update addressing user issues. Here's the changelog: https://docs.mattermost.com/help/apps/desktop-changelog.html
Latest versions now available for download: http://about.mattermost.com/download/
Overall, we created an open source, self-hosted alternative to proprietary SaaS communication for organizations that want to minimize security, lock-in, and privacy risks.
We're constantly improving, thanks to hundreds of people around the world contributing to the project.
Whatever issue you're experiencing, please consider nominating an improvement to help us get to where you want us to be? https://www.mattermost.org/feature-ideas/
Like you my company won't use it for privacy issue (we're dealing with sensitive things), but I still find that awesome.
The money - and the attention - of the generic population is momentary.
- Stop using facebook for personal purposes and treat it like a more featureful LinkedIn
- Quit my job and find another which doesn't require me to give work information to a company which has a trove of my personal information
I think the point of making it a completely separate account is to ease companies fears of users getting sucked into the endless scroll vortex while at work, and I would doubt they'd be jumping you back and forth and showing you notifications from personal/work Facebook when logged into either service. It would also be an obvious security/privacy issue if project info was popping up in users personal notifications.
Whether or not they are going to link the accounts on the backend for their data mining purposes, was not the intent or subject I was addressing/speculating about.
I'm well aware self-hosting can be hard, especially for global companies, with broad userbase, but I'm astounded how little managers and directors care about company "secrets" getting stored at providers these days.
I never thought I'm going to miss the old Microsoft, but at least those servers and services were bought and locally hosted. Sure, they may have had backdoors, but at least it was not obviously given to a company who's making their profit out of scanning contents and selling it to the highest bidder.
We don't know for sure it a paid Gmail is scannig mail or not; if a paid Dropbox is being treated the same way for, for example, "copyrighted" content the free tier is, but I would be surprised if it was completely different.
Linking to TC really isn't the best way to deliver what it is, and linking to Workplace directly is a much more 'HN' style submission.
Basically we wanted the single threaded chatroom with people mentions, we didn't want web forums which is what groups are.
If FB@Work really wants to compete, they will eventually have to make the slack/irc style rooms app. I also think you guys use IRC right?
Other people who say lack of single threaded chat rooms is a feature, not a bug smell like apple saying you don't need X until they release it themselves. You of course can 'make do' with whatever communication medium you have, but for us we found the chatroom useful. Nobody ever used FB@work, while natural adoption for slack in the corporation was very fast.
TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
Agree. I keep wondering when Google will release this Slack like chat app. We already use the other Google tools, and even Slack shells out to Hangouts for video.
The pricing seems really low for small firms and extremely expensive for larger ones. That sounds like a challenging position for the sales team working on this project.
I wonder if this comes with the full range of personalization algorithms for the feed.
Also wonder how they will handle the extensive customization that most enterprise customers will request.
It's a solid idea though, pretty similar to what Slack is trying to achieve.
it's actually great to have a more social way of catching up with people. The main driver for us was pulling all the 'coffee machine is broken' type emails out of our 'work system' (email) and also let people share pictures of their pets and different social events going on around the world.
Plus the advantage is that there was massive uptake super quickly since everyone already had built in knowledge of how to use it from facebook.
Plus I can say stuff on there without my parents commenting on every single post i ever make which is nice...
The technical document https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/account-manag... includes an example to create a new user via an authenticated POST request.
Previously facebook had a party line that each human had at most one facebook account (which was in contrast to its competitors where some humans had more than one account, e.g. @HistoryInPics), and creating an account required a few more hurdles than a single POST request. Now that businesses can create users it looks like that line has subtly disappeared.
If workplace takes off, I would expect faster growth in monthly active users because both the numerator will be larger and now business will be paying people to log in to facebook, and those users will also likely want to glance at their personal accounts, as well.
Plus, this move makes it harder for corporate firewalls to block facebook altogether, hits against google suite, and makes browsing facebook at work defensible... super interesting.
This should also keep facebook proper blockable.
I didn't catch the baseball theory part of your comment advertised in the beginning.
The reality is that to access all O365 products, you need to have access to CDN domains and live.com authentication infrastructure, and you need to constantly monitor errors in the network because cloud scale services change IPs all of the time.
I'm sure FB will be similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)
Huh? FB has the expertise in connecting people to each other and information. In hindsight, it looks like an obvious next step.
Don't forget Microsoft/LinkedIn.