Could Facebook be your new friend in the office? Zuck and co. hope so.
Unsatisfied with its 757 million daily users' average of 40 minutes per day looking at drunken photos of friends on Facebook, the company now hopes you'll start using Facebook for more business-y things. That's with a new project called Facebook at Work, uncovered by The Financial Times with the help of anonymous sources.
Verboten as a distraction at many workplaces, the social network could hope to challenge the likes of Microsoft, Linkedin, Google, and Dropbox. Per the FT report, the proposed site would likely have the same layout as the current Facebook, for better or worse. However, a key difference would be separate work identities for users, free from those pesky pet and baby pics. Other similarities would include a news feed and groups.
Facebook's popular messenger could lend itself well to work chats, a field currently dominated by Salesforce, Slack, and others. While LinkedIn now encourages users to post links and updates about their careers, it could make sense for Facebook to grow in an overlapping direction. But Wired wonders, rightly, if tech companies aren't fighting too fiercely to cover the same ground. Looming large are questions of security, too: Might companies be wary about storing internal documents on a Facebook site?
The enterprising network hasn't commented yet, or announced Facebook at Work publicly, but we'll update you if and when they do.
