Facebook has from Monday the tenth of October on expanded their service called ‘Workplace’. Earlier only a thousand companies were allowed to use the system, but from Monday on all businesses can use it. This application is meant as an internal communication system for organizations. The service has to deal with competitors like Chatter from Salesforce and Yammer from Microsoft. Workplace has the same look as the Facebook homepage and many functions has been copied. The newsfeed, the chat, personalized pages and groups are available on the service.
Another feature on this service is the interactivity between organizations, called the ‘multi-company-function’. The biggest difference with Facebook is that the profiles on Workplace are not public. The software could be seen as an intranet, an internal network. Besides that, no adverts will be shown on the webpage. The revenue for Facebook consists of the subscription that have to be paid by the organization. Dependent on the size of the organization the subscription is one to three dollars per month.
I think that these costs are not the only costs businesses pay for the service. All information shared via the service will be saved on one of the Facebook servers. Facebook will know a lot more in the future about companies, employees, management and general information about the organization. Privacy will decrease and Facebook will earn more money on advertising on the right target, but how save is our data? And is it smart to share all this information with a company like Facebook?
There has been a trial the last twenty months, which is joined by around a thousand companies. The joining companies for the real version are for example Royal Bank of Scotland, Danone and Starbucks. I am curious about their ideas behind Workplace and what they expect in the future of the service. Why do they trust it with personal and sensitive information?
References:
http://nos.nl/artikel/2137056-facebook-lanceert-zakelijke-variant workplace.html
http://www.nu.nl/internet/4334273/facebook-brengt-zakelijke-dienst-workplace.html
Thank you for your blog! To be honest, I am surprised that many companies are using it, even large corporations. When I read your blog, I couldn’t imagine wanting to use it as a company. Facebook is known to collect data, and Facebook is known to be used for informal things mainly (in my opinion). However, I have not seen or used workplace, so maybe it is a really good service. I guess for Facebook, with implementing new features, they can stay on top of current trends and remain in business. And I guess for companies, Workplace must be really good and perhaps even cheaper than other options, and perhaps Facebook made some kind of privacy agreement. Still, I am not sure that if I had my own large company, I would trust the application.