Section Branding
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It's Mark Zuckerberg's World, Chapter 134: Facebook At Work
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You really should be wrapping up those TPS reports at work. (And don't forget the coversheets - didn't you get the memo?) But you can't resist updating your Facebook status, which of course leads to checking out what your friends are saying, which of course leads to another morning of obliterated productivity courtesy of the Godzilla of social networks.
Maybe the company is just trying to keep you from having to use Facebook while your bosses aren't looking, but the Financial Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg is getting ready to launch Facebook At Work, a business-only version of the social network that will feature messaging, professional contact-sharing and document collaboration. Users will be able to separate their personal News Feeds from this work-based version.
Facebook At Work is already being tested at a few companies, according to the FT. The early hype pits this as Facebook's way of taking on LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft Office in the business realm. But don't forget enterprise-focused companies like Salesforce, which loudly promotes its social network-style services to corporations eager to take advantage of real-time chats and sanctioned workplace sharing. Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 as a way to compete for the same big budget customers.
It's a smart flexing of Facebook's muscles, powered by more than 1 billion worldwide users who are already familiar with the network's way of posting information and images. Zuckerberg's company has successfully proven it can sell ads via its mobile products, and now it believes it can charge large companies for a branded package of services that their employees can use to be more productive.
That is, if it can get past that security thing.
Yes, that's security, not privacy. Despite protestations over Facebook's evolving privacy standards since its launch in 2004, they haven't had much of an impact on the company's staggering growth. The company does get the attention of the Federal Trade Commission and the much-tougher European Union, and Facebook is currently engaging in one of its biannual privacy setting tweaks, this time focusing on easier explanations of how to manage who sees what on your News Feed. Granted, it's the targeted ad data that's now the focus of privacy advocates, and Facebook still needs to empower its customers regarding what can and can't be used by third party advertisers. But privacy concerns haven't kept any of us from sharing our children's pictures, political ideologies and bachelorette party pics on Facebook, especially via smartphones and tablets.
Yet data breaches at retailers and other big businesses have dominated security headines in 2014. If A-list brands are going to fork over money to Zuckerberg for Facebook At Work, they're going to want plenty of assurances that all that mobile sharing by their workforces won't come back to bite them in their bottom lines via hacks of vital corporate information. Many of them may not be using point-of-sale devices like those hacked in the Home Depot and Target breaches, but as we've seen from recent incidents involving the U.S. Postal Service and other governmental agencies, employee data is proving to be just as valuable to online criminals as customer information.
It is indeed a Facebook world, and we just live in it. Whether we'll soon be working in it too, on Facebook's official platform, depends on whether it can keep those TPS reports (and coversheets!) safe from prying eyes.