Well everybody who has been closely watching must have seen this coming, the vast world of the consumer social media interactions , is actually becoming small for Facebook. Its no longer this startup company that everybody is excited about it now has wall street to look after, shareholders to please and a future to secure.
No wonder why Facebook has been rumoured at looking at a new flavour of Facebook, “Facebook at Work”. Which in a nutshell means that Facebook wants to tap into the millions being spent by large enterprises on software to further enable their work force , cause the money coming from the consumer/advertising business is no longer sufficient. I find it outstanding how this shift is happening to Facebook very soon after the enormous price tag is paid for Whatsapp !! , which kind of signalled that Facebook is more committed to the consumer market and not really interested in the enterprise sector.
So what would “Facebook at Work” if the rumour is correct would look like. Articles have been popping here and there all round suggesting that Facebook is building the new rival to LinkedIn, well I certainly hope they are not , cause that kind of really adds nothing to their portfolio and does not move them into the enterprise space . I am more of the idea that if this rumour is true , Facebook is actually creating a 21st century collaboration tool, so kind of what Yammer, SharePoint , Box, and Syncplicity failed to do over the past years.
If I would be in the room with people working on the “Facebook at Work” I would aim to create something that would be:
- Being for work does not mean a crappy interface so something really neat
- Proper mobility that does not loose the functionality you would get when using the desktop version
- If we talk work then we are talking documents here not pictures, so a new innovative document changes tracking mechanism
- Easy sharing functionalities
- Proper multi-tenancy
- Extreme control for every user, you do not want to end up with something that suddenly breaks your entire PC’s privacy and gets everything shared there.
In short if Facebook is to walk down this root of licensed software for the enterprise, it needs to do the collaboration aspect what Salesforce.com did to the sales force of every company which is practically almost everybody now.