No matter how much you try, how packed your schedule is or how close that deadline on your project is, comes a time when you just space out for a second. Next thing you know, you’re on Facebook again. Whether it’s a birthday notification that needs your immediate attention (before you forget and risk hurting anyone’s feelings) or the most random hilarious posts, the social media platform will always remain in the corner of your gaze on whatever you’re doing.
And that moment when you have finally managed to close your Facebook tab and get back to work, someone deciding to text you regarding urgent information – work related or not – will immediately ruin your whole plan.
First world problems, but still real.
No matter how you look at it, it’s probably still our fault for letting Facebook get to us like that. The only excuse we still have is the growth in popularity Facebook’s messaging system has gain when used between work colleagues to exchange files or discuss work-related issues. When that happens, it’s nearly impossible to avoid being distracted by everything else that the application has to offer.
Because of that, and several other things on the company’s development agenda has convinced them to go right ahead and release a test version of the next great thing: Facebook at Work.
Sadly, the Facebook at Work application is not a magical tool to prevent us from being distracted at work; at least, that’s not the primary use of it even though it comes as a partial side effect. Apparently this is something that the company has been working on since last year and is finally complete and ready for testing and has already been launched on Google Play and Apple’s App Store last week. At this stage, only a few select companies will be able to make use of it until further notice – that is, until the testing phase of the product is finalized and the app is ready for official launch towards anyone who wishes to adopt it.
Facebook at Work’s primary goal is to function as a replacement tool for intranet email that will offer a reliable way for colleagues within a company to communicate, exchange files and much more – all done via a mobile app or a web interface. This app has already been through its very personal, very hands-on alpha testing phase within Facebook’s company itself over the past few months, where it picked up on a number of ways Facebook changed the way we see communication and connect to our proxies.
Facebook has been out for years and for most of us, it’s difficult to remember the time without it; that is why the company has adopted the very essence of the platform when developing their Facebook for Work variant. Everything you see and use makes for a very similar experience to the regular Facebook, however several important improvements have been brought. A few examples would be the disappearance of advertisements and the lack of user surveillance –Facebook at Work would not track your activity or retain your personal data like the original platform is meant to.
But serving different purposes obviously made for different ways of looking at the platform. For a social media platform, your purpose is to gain as much popularity for your service through a series of tools at your disposal, then rely on advertisements for sustainability and income.
Naturally, given the context that Facebook at Work will be functioning in, the number of users is not expected to be as high as one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. So there’s good reason to expect subscriptions to be a part of being able to use this service. Most likely they will be calculated for the entire company willing to make use of the Facebook at Work. Not only that, but Facebook isn’t the only company who has considered bringing this kind of service at life; many other software giants and other large multinationals are actively competing on this market – Microsoft has hinted at this long ago by acquiring social enterprise company Yammer several years back and IBM’s internal communication tool Slack.
The basic point that Facebook is starting its workplace communication tool from is familiarity – it is confident that it can make a good use of its strongly familiar interface and easy to use functions to make its way into offices and workplaces all over the world. Adapting to a new means of communication over the classic internal email – that, come to think of it, is somewhat limited, storage space-wise at least – would be incredibly easy to do and the platform itself would be optimized to help employees collaborate as efficiently as possible.
However, there seems to be a general concern travelling around regarding the privacy of the individuals making use of the Facebook at Work interface. While the company insists that there wouldn’t be any data tracking involved in using the platform, there is no way to avoid the way said data would be stored – on Facebook owned servers. That way, whether you want it to happen or not, Facebook becomes part of confidential conversations and information of subscriber companies. While things such as confidentiality contracts are the easiest way to get over that part of the ordeal, many companies might feel relatively reluctant at the potential ability of Facebook to collect and hold the personal information of its users.
