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Are you using Facebook at the workplace to chat during work hours with your friends or to keep a close contact with your colleagues and collaborators? You don’t need to hide these activities anymore, as Facebook plans to turn your chatting and gossiping activities into professional behavior with the help of Facebook at Work, a new website focused on companies.
The report comes from the Financial Times and highlights on the secrecy of this project. But just as it always happens in tech news world, a company’s secret plans always find their way to reach the public attention. According to the leaks, Facebook at Work is a new website which will look a lot like Facebook, but in turn will allow users to keep their personal Facebook profiles separate from their professional Facebook profiles. No more worries that the boss will scald you on talking to clients, partners and co – workers via Facebook! No more worries that your personal statuses and daily rants will deteriorate your image as a potential job candidate!
Facebook wants to directly compete with LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google and give the users the possibility to chat with your team members and colleagues, to keep a tight contact with collaborators, partners and clients and to work over documents in real time.
This is one major step for Facebook, as it wants to enter the corporate world through the front door by offering business clients a product they may already use in the shape of Office 365. Moreover, the sharing projects feature is a slap on the face of Google Drive, a leader in the documents’ sharing market. Dropbox might feel the effects of this slap too.
LinkedIn’s main leverage is its ability to connect employers, candidates, companies and partners together, and Facebook wants a slice of that cake too, as Faceboot at Work intends to cover all these services and features.
Since many companies downright banned the private Facebook use of their employees during work hours, Facebook is now attempting to convince companies that being in permanent contact with the outside world, on a professional level, of course, would be good for business.
According to the Financial Times report, Facebook is testing this new Facebook at Work website with a handful of chosen companies, to see how it works. Moreover, there is a general assumption that Facebook won’t charge its corporate clients for this new service, at least for now.
While Facebook officials couldn’t be contacted for further comment upon the issue and its secrecy, the tech specialists are convinced that everything is true. Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg himself stated that Facebook was
investing aggressively, connecting everyone, understanding the world, and building the next-generation in computing platforms.
Given these statements and the latest reports, it seems that Facebook will announce new surprises sooner than we thought.
