Facebook Developing ‘Facebook at Work’ Service, Says Report

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Facebook is apparently testing a product called Facebook at Work, designed to let people, well, use Facebook at work.

According to anonymous sources speaking with The Financial Times , the new service would be completely separate from Facebook’s consumer product. The FT says the service would allow users to message their colleagues, connect with other people in their professional network, and collaborate on work.

Facebook declined to comment for this story. But if the company is indeed working on an enterprise product, it would challenge a long list of big-name rivals, including Google, Microsoft, Box, Salesforce.com, and LinkedIn.

The level of one-upmanship in Silicon Valley has been relentless recently, as tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon—already dominant in their respective fields—fight for an even larger slice of the pie. In doing so, they’ve begun to encroach on each other’s turf. Facebook wanted to become a player in search, and so there was Facebook Graph Search. Google wanted in on the social networking trend, and so, it launched Google Plus. Meanwhile, Google and Amazon continue to battle it out for supremacy in same-day delivery.

Facebook’s interest in the enterprise is just the most recent example of this type of competitive expansion. As a business-centric social network with the ability to instantly message colleagues, it would go up against Salesforce’s Chatter, Microsoft’s Yammer, and the red-hot messaging tool Slack. By offering businesses a way to collaborate on documents, it would be simultaneously competing with Google Docs, Box, and Dropbox. And as a way of establishing social connections in the workplace, the tool would also become a challenger to LinkedIn.

It’s hard to tell, at this point, how Facebook would differentiate itself from these formidable incumbents. The Financial Times reports that although users of Facebook at Work will be able to keep their personal accounts separate, the site will include Facebook staples, including groups and News Feed. And yet, it may be a challenge for Facebook, a company intent on tapping user data for advertising purposes, to convince businesses that their internal documents and conversations will remain confidential on the site.

But the tool makes sense for Mark Zuckerberg and company. As a consumer product, Facebook has to compete with every other app on the market for users’ already limited attention. But if Facebook could be the engine running the workplace, then it would have a captive audience, which would make the platform all the more appealing to its true end users — advertisers.