14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is apparently working on a new project that will help it make its way into every aspect of your life, a new site called “Facebook at Work.”
According to the Financial Times, the world’s largest social network is developing a new product that’s designed to help keep you in touch with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents.
This puts Facebook right in the path of several products that are already out there, including LinkedIn, Google Drive or Microsoft Office. However, by the sound of it, Facebook at Work has plenty of chances of becoming quite popular.
The new site supposedly looks very much like the Facebook we’re already used to, it comes with a newsfeed and groups, but it will allow users to keep their personal profile, full of personal photos, posts and whatever silly videos people like sharing, away from their work identity.
Basically, you’ll be able to choose what things your coworkers and business partners see on your professional profile, which means you’ll be able to keep things extra clean, along with your reputation.
Already in the testing phase
Reports indicate that this new project has actually been in the works for a while now, especially since Facebook employees have been using the network in their daily work anyway. It’s likely that they were the first to notice just how constrained you can be when you know that one or more of the people in your friend list are actually co-workers and work contacts.
Several companies seem to already be testing the service which Facebook’s employees have been working on for the past year.
LinkedIn’s market share is likely in danger now that Facebook has this new project since Facebook is easier to use, as a rule, and it could reach a lot more people than LinkedIn does. Making the switch from one service to another is likely to only take a few minutes for most and building the network could be done extremely fast, too. There’s also the fact that LinkedIn has some 90 million active monthly users, while Facebook hits 1.3 billion.
There is, of course, the risk that some may not want to associate their professional lives with Facebook out of principle.
First, however, Facebook needs to win people’s trust, be those companies, workers and even students. Since many companies are worried about their workers’ productivity levels if Facebook enters this new market side, that’s also a hurdle Facebook will need to figure out how to cross.
