Considering the backlash against Slack [0], it’ll be interesting to see if Messenger’s model of more “atomic” conversations will create less interruptions. Slack (much like IRC) really contributes to an expectation of continuous conversation throughout the day/night (although not all people deal with it that way). In comparison, Messenger (and other chat apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) seem to be more designed towards short chats about specific topics, while still allowing for deeper, longer conversations (even larger groups) if needed. Could be a huge win.
Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings.
I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)?
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
Agreed! Tools almost always reflect the flaws of their users — but it’s not to say that the flaws of the tool proper can’t harm a user too. In Slack’s case, I think their notification settings (and the defaults in particular) encourage an always-on culture that can be hard for some corporate cultures to resist.
Regarding public communications — I think that only aggravates the noise/always-on issue, but if that’s your think, you can of course do that on email. See examples from Stripe [0] and Buffer [1]. (Not sure if/how that scales though! Was there a follow-up from these companies?)
I agree, the defaults in Slack are too chatty. I think the web interface also does not differentiate as well between messages directed at you and message in a channel you're a part of.
My public communications preference I have based on Buffer and Stripe. It's not that everyone has to respond, but that I think that the more information everyone has the quicker they can respond to problems in the right manner.
The cure to Slack: Do NOT install slack on your phone. And if it is, remove it.
It's the hell to get notifications all day, before you're at work, after you left work. The slack dev didn't bother putting a button to stop beeping on incoming message or to stop receiving messages at all.
Because in slack I have to check 100 inboxes full of messages not important to me rather than a single inbox with a far higher signal to noise ratio
It doesn't matter if I turn off notifications I'm still expected to know generally what's happened in my company's 100 channels.
With slack it becomes my responsibility to dig through those 100 channels. With email it's the sender's responsibility to make sure I'm on the list if they need/want my response/input and if it turns out I'm not interested I can easily mute that one thread
I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team.
Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?
I don't agree with that at all. I am a consultant. I see lots of companies. I see lots of companies jumping on the "plug our employees 24/7 into everything" bandwagon. Slack has a moral obligation--we all have the moral obligation--to not be the stooge of bad actors just as it works to improve the productivity of good ones. If Slack took this seriously, it would do significantly more to protect its users from toxic behavior.
For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning. This empowers assholes to be bigger assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by providing tools to be shittier; you can never not be at their beck and call; if you refuse to answer, that's you being bad and not the person who feels entitled to interrupt your life on a whim.
You also cannot mute or block users on a Slack. This disempowers people downrange of assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by not providing tools to avoid the perpetuators of shitty culture. (They have been asked for this feature and have refused.)
> For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning.
How is this any different than someone calling you at 4am? Or sending a bunch of emails? This has nothing to do with Slack and everything to do with a bad company.
The context of email, in my experience, is that "you'll get the email when you see it." Slack's ephemera, the social contract that it encourages, is "you are on all the time." It is an asynchronous communication tool that it tries to convince its users is synchronous, and if you aren't using it in a synchronous manner (as I don't, for the most part), you are breaking that perceived illusion. You are not being a Team Player.
There is a significantly different social implication to clicking the "fuck your do-not-disturb settings" link and calling you. (I would argue that the former should be worse, but it isn't, ever.) Ephemera matters. Context matter. Slack creates a bad context. They own that.
Slack's job is to make communication easier, and apparently it is doing just that based on its massive user base spike. I'm signed into 6 different Slack org's right now on my laptop to let me talk to different clients all at once and is extremely easy to use and a great timesaver.
When I leave my desk my phone gets direct messages to me that I've missed. It is incredibly useful and is doing it's job. All of the complaints above are all just deflecting your company's lack of respect for your personal time. Don't feel like being on instant messenger away from your PC? Don't install it on your phone, or turn mobile notifications off.
I've worked at previous jobs where my manager would send emails at 1AM to my BlackBerry and expect a quick response. I didn't blame BlackBerry for that, I blamed my previous management for expecting me to be online 24x7.
> I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures.
Then why are their own advertisements touting their product being used in dysfunctional ways? Doesn't that set the tone for how (and where) it will be deployed and used?
> The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)
> Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.
> Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.
Bad idea. Consider how much time people/employees waste on Facebook every day. What company would encourage their users to login to Facebook during work hours? The notifications will send them to the news feed, which becomes a black hole the moment one starts scrolling down the page
Facebook
This massive social network deserves a mention on its own.
This makes up 7% of the websites accessed at work and is a
major contributor to all the wasted time in the workplace.
1. Social media sites. Not surprisingly, visiting social
media sites is the black hole of workplace productivity.
Facebook is the top social destination, with 41 percent of
survey respondents logging in from work every day. Facebook
is not the only culprit however; LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter
and more recently Pinterest all claim their share of
work-hour traffic.
I don't know. I didn't look at the design closely. I stay away from Facebook as much as possible. The more I stay away, the more things I get done in life.
They have a strong incentive to keep people on their site for as long as possible and they are extremely good at it, so I think it's a huge mistake for companies to send employees anywhere near it.
As an user of FB@W, and now Workspace, its Work Chat is largely useless. No native client, no API, the only crowd control is group.
It's just a dumbed down version of Messenger, and I don't think a team in my company want to use it, Slack is much better and worth learning. After several months we're just using it as another Viber/Whatsapp/etc..
Previously facebook had a party line that each human had at most one facebook account (which was in contrast to its competitors where some humans had more than one account, e.g. @HistoryInPics), and creating an account required a few more hurdles than a single POST request. Now that businesses can create users it looks like that line has subtly disappeared.
If workplace takes off, I would expect faster growth in monthly active users because both the numerator will be larger and now business will be paying people to log in to facebook, and those users will also likely want to glance at their personal accounts, as well.
Plus, this move makes it harder for corporate firewalls to block facebook altogether, hits against google suite, and makes browsing facebook at work defensible... super interesting.
I think each workplace by facebook will have seperate users and separate domains, so the user-count of facebook-proper will not be affected by companies have bulk access to account creation.
This should also keep facebook proper blockable.
I didn't catch the baseball theory part of your comment advertised in the beginning.
Microsoft said that too about O365, and its true -- for Exchange and Outlook only.
The reality is that to access all O365 products, you need to have access to CDN domains and live.com authentication infrastructure, and you need to constantly monitor errors in the network because cloud scale services change IPs all of the time.
Since we're talking about communication channels, when I was first reading your comment, I read "party line" as in a shared phone line that people used in the early telephone service days. I was definitely confused. :)
I don't get the negativity. This is kinda awesome! News feeds will be good to monitor what's going on across many groups / teams, groups can help your team post and communicate across various topics (same with messaging). Honestly the live video streams on demand is kinda huge; this isn't always something easy for companies to do especially large companies but Facebook can pull this off and make it look great for thousands of users.
Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.
Because you'd rather your work related conversations stored in Slack? Google Hangouts? Skype? GoToMeeting? There are not very many on prem solutions that are very good, so do you not use any of them or is it specifically against Facebook and if the latter why so?
It's also not very good- both the desktop and iOS clients (that I use) are horribly slow to load, clunky, and require multiple (laggy) clicks just to get to a notification of a message. I'd much rather pay for something else, on-prem and open source be damned.
The Mattermost iOS app works best on a fast connection. To accommodate slow connections, we're adding React Native (same technology as Facebook) to get competitive with Facebook's iOS app performance over time.
Overall, we created an open source, self-hosted alternative to proprietary SaaS communication for organizations that want to minimize security, lock-in, and privacy risks.
We're constantly improving, thanks to hundreds of people around the world contributing to the project.
Last time I checked, Slack's business model was not based on advertisements and they did not have an incentive to give/sell your data to third parties (I'm sorry, partners).
It was made in London. At least until someone triggers article 50 it's more European than American :) More to your point, the article mentions getting the privacy/security certifications that companies look for. And if you're paying for the product, there's not the privacy concerns as when you are the product, etc. I'm actually impressed with this thing so far.
I am in Germany.
The NSA debacle made a lot of important people quite unhappy here, not to mention the current tensions between DBank & DOJ and so on... - so I am afraid we would interpret this a bit like Apple's labels, except in this case we would read:
Some have interpreted the DOJ fine to be a sort of retaliation for fines applied by EU to Apple/Google (especially the first for the Ireland tax rebates).
I have no particular authority in saying if this is actually the case or not, but my feeling is that in Europe (and especially in Germany) there will be a lot of resistance towards Facebook solutions (the recent Whatsapp decision to share data with the parent company is another thing that did not sit well here, for example).
Norway is one of the major beta markets and full of early adopters. Though some of the companies among them likely just want to be one of the cool kids.
But if that's possible in any way FaceBook and the company paying would be subject to breaking many corporate espionage laws in addition to destroying FaceBook's enterprise business IN ITS ENTIRETY should it be found out.
Seems like an insane amount of risk for such a very tiny reward.
Yet, each of the major carriers and RSA did it for the NSA in exchange for $30-(80?) million. Happened at plenty of other companies with or without nation state involvement. The big ones are still in business.
Besides, what does the EULA say on the product? Their EULA usually says something along the lines of they can do whatever they want with your data. I'm interested to see if anyone sees something similar in the enterprise agreement.
This is exactly why I don't see how a company would be concerned. Lots of b2b relationships exist and are based on trust with legal ramifications for when that trust is broken.
I think you have no idea how to real world works. Most of the arguments against Facebook sadly seem to be wildly out of touch with reality. Amazing that these essentially conspiracy theories are cultivated by otherwise pretty smart people - software engineers.
Real world? You must be aware of real world events in which this sort of thing really has already happened.
The ultimate arbiter is reality, and in reality this sort of thing does already happen. We could do it brazenly over the counter, or alternatively I could pay Facebook to act as a consultant; to give me their view of my market. To satisfy the legal chaps, we can just scrape the names off the data and then summarise it in a nice binder. A number of financial companies do this today. The fines are peanuts compared to the profits.
Even when it isn't company policy in some way, it is easy to bribe an employee to simply hand over a big chunk of data. The "real world" shows us that this does and will happen.
As an aside, I would suggest that the "real world" in the sense of which you are speaking doesn't even exist. Everyone, everywhere, builds their own cocoon of social mores and illusions and local conventions, and from my perspective it is you who doesn't understand it. If you're going to suggest that laws will stop it happening, I remind you that the law is whatever you can successfully negotiate and argue and persuade and influence as necessary, and big companies with deep pockets can do that very well. Some things are very hard to argue; shooting someone for no reason on live TV. Some things are eminently arguable; the Chinese wall between the data holding division and the business consultancy division. Really happening, every day, in the real world.
Its disappointing that you are trying to counter my question and keep suggesting this happens in the real world all the time with no citation to support it.
Lots of illicit things happen should we just shut down the world entirely? Cars kill people so we shouldn't approach the streets. Food can make you ill if supply chains don't handle it properly so we should stop eating.
You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works.
It's pretty well known that the Chinese walls in banks, designed to prevent some parts of the business illegally using information from other parts of the business, spent much of the approach to the 2008 financial collapse being ignored, and were often used to screw customers over for the purposes of enriching the banks. RBS just got busted for creating subsidiaries and feeding them confidential information for exactly that purpose. It was in the news in the last fortnight.
It's not at all disappointing to me to me that you bleat bullshit about "citation needed" as a defence. It's pretty expected around here; no need to actually do any work, just sit smugly pretending that you're civil and polite. Here we are engaging in yet more bullshit passive aggressiveness, each of us pretending that we're being oh-so-civil and look, look, it's the other one who's wrong, I'm just asking questions.
If you actually wanted to know, you could have found lots of examples yourself. You DON'T want to know, because this isn't about knowing anything. This is about some stranger on the internet disagreeing with your pre-formed opinions (which are pretty unusual around here, actually - the common religion here of free market fundamentalism would take it as read that FB will sell your information to your competitors) and your opportunity to posture and present yourself as reasonable.
So fuck you and fuck me, and fuck this passive-aggressive childishness that goes on around here as petty posturing from smug dickheads like you and like me. If you choose not to believe me, that's fine, but don't you dare suggest that it's my fucking job to educate you. I'm done with this passive-aggressive crap.
"You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works."
No I'm not, and you fucking know it. I'm suggesting that giving your information to FB will lead to other people getting it. That's what I'm suggesting. This junk on the end about cars killing people is your strawman attempt to smugly present yourself as some kind of adult.
Except there is no evidente that anyone would care. They are sharing huge amounts of data on individuals with third parties. People continue to use and pay for the service.
Businesses have a tendency to protect themselves in a much more proactive way than individuals seem to do. Most people react when companies abuse their relationship. Businesses have IP to protect along with consider the implications for insider trading? What if a publicly trading company used this platform for their employees and conversation eluded to something which gave anyone someone at Facebook access to this information.
People don't feel comfortable sharing their pictures of cats and such but businesses have their livelihood to protect.
Have you seen how many people use ad blockers? I'm finding people on Reddit and Imgur who talk about using NoScript and uMatrix! People are learning, but as with all things, it takes time.
Yep. They had an automatic system for doing that in the past for people who used the product and people who didn't but were in photos uploaded by users. I still don't have a picture on Facebook with my name for that reason. They've figured out a lot about me anyway. The many mistakes are hilarious, though.
While I appreciate being informed what does or doesn't make me a fool by internet strangers, I don't think that was the concern of the parent post. I believe their concern was that they would be seeing work related content popup while they were on their personal Facebook account thus mixing work/personal life.
I think the point of making it a completely separate account is to ease companies fears of users getting sucked into the endless scroll vortex while at work, and I would doubt they'd be jumping you back and forth and showing you notifications from personal/work Facebook when logged into either service. It would also be an obvious security/privacy issue if project info was popping up in users personal notifications.
Whether or not they are going to link the accounts on the backend for their data mining purposes, was not the intent or subject I was addressing/speculating about.
Nope, the concern of the parent post was that they would link my work and personal profiles behind the scenes. I don't want to see work-related content pop up, but it's a secondary concern. I don't want Facebook to know what I do both when I'm at work and when I'm on personal time, because I don't trust their company.
Sorry for misreading you and making assumptions. Can I ask why you are more concerned about Facebook having your workplace's information than your own personal information? Assuming that your workplace chose to offer their information up to Facebook by subscribing to their service...
I would not be concerned about them having my workplace's information if they did not have my personal information. I'm fine with them having personal information, or workplace information, but not both. The only thing missing for Facebook then would be to watch me while I sleep.
No, I'm not. But it appears that HiPPO decisions and their personal preference of Gmail over [other email software] is driving the world these days.
I'm well aware self-hosting can be hard, especially for global companies, with broad userbase, but I'm astounded how little managers and directors care about company "secrets" getting stored at providers these days.
I never thought I'm going to miss the old Microsoft, but at least those servers and services were bought and locally hosted. Sure, they may have had backdoors, but at least it was not obviously given to a company who's making their profit out of scanning contents and selling it to the highest bidder.
We don't know for sure it a paid Gmail is scannig mail or not; if a paid Dropbox is being treated the same way for, for example, "copyrighted" content the free tier is, but I would be surprised if it was completely different.
Yes, because I use Duck Duck Go for browsing and my personal emails are generally not very revealing. Google certainly has a good deal of my personal information, but I purposefully keep it limited. For that reason, I'm okay with having them as my work email provider.
I see this as an interesting circle of life, which is yet to reach hardware manufacturers: the fact the real, reliable money can only come from businesses.
The money - and the attention - of the generic population is momentary.
Their competitor is not Slack but Salesforce. Salesforce is a leader in enterprise CRM. Facebook with apps, messenger and cloud infrastructure is way ahead on tech and usability front. This move if for getting users from entreprise.
Previous job used Yammer. People spent most of their time on the site complaining about the company there. Daily notifications by default containing a ton of garbage. After reading Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro I figured it was a tool for HR to hold opinions against individuals, so I deleted my account and kept my opinions to myself.
Interesting, there is definitely a market for this. Some of our customers at getstream.io use the API to build their own Facebook style apps for within their organizations. Building your own in-house social networks is of course quite a bit of work. Facebook should be much easier to get up and running.
The pricing seems really low for small firms and extremely expensive for larger ones. That sounds like a challenging position for the sales team working on this project.
I wonder if this comes with the full range of personalization algorithms for the feed.
Also wonder how they will handle the extensive customization that most enterprise customers will request.
It's a solid idea though, pretty similar to what Slack is trying to achieve.
My company was part of the prerelease program and its basically just like using a more professional version of Facebook. Like linkedin but internal only.
it's actually great to have a more social way of catching up with people. The main driver for us was pulling all the 'coffee machine is broken' type emails out of our 'work system' (email) and also let people share pictures of their pets and different social events going on around the world.
Plus the advantage is that there was massive uptake super quickly since everyone already had built in knowledge of how to use it from facebook.
Plus I can say stuff on there without my parents commenting on every single post i ever make which is nice...
An horrifically cluttered UI, but having evaluated many of these workplace collabortaion tools in the past it's actually pretty par for the course. For some reason our HR partners always wanted everything on one page, like a massive disfunctional sci-fi spacecraft dashboard with lights flashing everywhere.
As others have said, this feels very similar to Yammer. Microsoft has made a strong pivot to enterprise software over the past couple of years, whereas this feels like Facebook's first foray.
Although I don't doubt Facebook's agility, I give other enterprise software companies the advantage sheerly due to their head start.
The benefit Facebook has is hundreds if not thousands of hours of familiarity with their overall interfaces (per user). When I viewed their demo videos, it all looked extremely familiar to me, having used Facebook since about 2006. Whether or not this is the case, it made the design feel good and pleasing.
When I look at Yammer or other services that are totally fresh, I am not at all familiar. I'm totally willing to learn new interfaces and get familiar, but there are a lot of people that would prefer to stick with what they are familiar with.
We deployed this last month, taking part in the early access program. On the whole it's been of net cultural benefit for our non-profit. Our staff seem more engaged with the overall mission, better informed about what's going on and more likely to share information that they might have been reticent to share over email.
I really like that it's completely separate from my 'personal' Facebook, and it seems with the rebranding from "Facebook at Work" they're trying to emphasize that separation even more.
So now employers are being told to have their employees put business data (potentially even sensitive or secret) on US servers that are "owned" by the US government (see PRISM, etc.), while everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country.
Considering that the door was wide open with Google Docs (err, Suite), Microsoft Office 365, respective e-mail offerings (Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook), Yammer, Github, Box, Dropbox and Slack, I don't know if "now" is an appropriate term to use.
> everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country.
I didn't know that, can you give some examples of this?
I heard about the US government making a WTO claim over bribery by Airbus in Saudi Arabia ostensibly discovered by electronic surveillance (not PRISM-related), but this is in the gray area.
The American surveillance infrastructure was deployed, allegedly for corporate espionage, against targets in France [1], Germany and Brazil [2]. The IMF, the World Bank and the EU antitrust commissioner, amongst others, were likely targeted to help politically-connected companies [3].
I appreciate your links to articles about espionage activities with corporate targets. None of them mention any examples of economic benefit, due or undue.
The infamous Petrobras espionage that was implied because it appeared in a slide in a training presentation is a great example of justified espionage (if it occurred; it probably occurred). Less than 2 years later, Petrobras was implicated in massive corruption scandals involving the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff. U.S. decision makers should probably know if a trade partner and friendly nation is about to have massive political unrest due to corruption charges!
If you wish to change the subject to "economic espionage is wrong" or something like that, feel free. If so, please don't imply my assertion is incorrect. I think that is misleading.
What about FIFA? And why nobody is hearing about it anymore? All that scandal was only to pressure brazillian major media group, Globo, responsible for most of bribering in futebol. But then Globo delivered what US demanded and nobody hear about FIFA scandal anymore
The Intercept article [1] references the DNI's 2009 Quadriennial Intelligence Community review report [2] which "envisions a scenario in which companies from India and Russia work together to develop technological innovation, and the U.S. intelligence community then 'conducts cyber operations' against 'research facilities' in those countries, acquires their proprietary data, and then 'assesses whether and how its findings would be useful to U.S. industry'."
So no, we don't have a smoking gun. But we do have a powerful agency with questionable oversight which has proven its willingness to lie to Congress and documented its willingness to deploy intelligence assets in ways that prove "useful to U.S. industry".
Yeah, they're on The Guardian from when before Greenwald turned the leaks into his The Intercept venture [1]. It was one of the documents in the 2nd round of leaks about a month or so after the original PRISM and phone metadata. This presentation was the first evidence that the United States spied on State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in addition to foreign governments.
The presentation was for analyst training, and the Petrobras intrusion was nonchalantly used as an example.
If you're just getting into learning about the Snowden leaks and NSA network exploitation, I would suggest starting from the beginning in 2013, checking out the original The Guardian articles and the NYT and Washington Post ones. Der Spiegel also received one or two leaks as well; the articles were written by Jacob Appelbaum and are fairly thorough. The Guardian and Der Spiegel articles are heavily editorialized and jump to some conclusions that were later discounted, but overall the reporting is decent.
As someone who has used Chatter since 2011, it is a half baked product at best. My daily digests are mostly junk, it has no way to filter out, Uploading images looks like you went back to '99. Try uploading multiple images to one comment. Try replying to comments to create a thread... Want to view that image someone just added, no mouse over to zoom, you must click and leave the entire page to view. The feed if expanded takes up massive real estate on the screen to the point the rest of the page is unusable. I could go on, while their Lightning is a better take on it, it will take YEARS to move the bigger companies over to the LEX as they all have custom pages and solutions developed using the old styles, plus LEX is not fully baked yet, still some features missing.
What has changed about that market that makes this more appealing to businesses than Yammer? OR what about the product makes it more compelling than Yammer?
Particularly, Facebook's history of unethial actions regarding private data. It should almost be criminal for IT shop to put confidential info on a Facebook service.
This is what I see groups for. Chat for small groups, Facebook groups for larger groups and long-form posts that require more in-depth discussion. This is what we do internally at Facebook and it works pretty well.
We didn't find the response time good enough compared to chat rooms and notifications were vague. Group chats being limited to 50 people was limiting for many use cases and there was no discoverability for people find chat groups since they were all private. Inviting people into group chats didn't work as well and I think there was a group chat history problem with new joiners. I'm also not quite sure if general file attachments worked.
Basically we wanted the single threaded chatroom with people mentions, we didn't want web forums which is what groups are.
If FB@Work really wants to compete, they will eventually have to make the slack/irc style rooms app. I also think you guys use IRC right?
Other people who say lack of single threaded chat rooms is a feature, not a bug smell like apple saying you don't need X until they release it themselves. You of course can 'make do' with whatever communication medium you have, but for us we found the chatroom useful. Nobody ever used FB@work, while natural adoption for slack in the corporation was very fast.
TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
>TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
Agree. I keep wondering when Google will release this Slack like chat app. We already use the other Google tools, and even Slack shells out to Hangouts for video.
I believe that is deliberate and if Facebook wants to succeed beyond tech companies, it will do well not to add any programmer-happy / commands, @usernames and single-threaded chatrooms
We have used GroupMe for a few years, but I am dissatisfied with how limited it is. Our team is not sitting at a computer all day and mostly needs to share information efficiently.
With 3 locations, it needs to be digital. With 2 shift blocks per day, 7 days per week, it is hard to keep everyone working collaboratively on things like promotions, social media marketing efforts, etc.
I also like that it includes the opportunity to work with other companies.
I am also a SaaS software vendor for retail store owners like me. I could definitely see integrating this into our app (ResaleAI.com) and had considered Slack and others. So yeah, I signed up to play with it internally first.
A cheaper server is ~$7k. It means that a company of of 9k personnel ( which is not too small ) will produce $18k per month. That can buy 2 servers per month and maybe cover some of the bandwidth costs.
To get a rack of servers - which I believe is the minimum to actually serve a company of this size - you'll need to have them on board for about 2 years (!) before profit starts to flow in. Unfortunately by that time you'll need start replacing the servers, since they have ~3 years of warranty these days.
For me this looks like no profit, which could mean two things:
1. The pricing is deliberately low, so it's either going to be raised later or it's covered from other parts of the company, and this is a step only to buy into an area currently covered by others.
2. The will use the data you provide for other purposes.
( 3. Both. )
With the first scenario, this will probably not live too long; a few years, maybe, but it's hard for me to believe that they would just pump money into this, just to eliminate others, but you never know.
With the second scenario... corporate espionage becomes obsolete.
Could use something like GNU social, and then could keep the network self-hosted and private, and not worry about being locked into possible future price-hikes. https://gnu.io/social/
According to their 2015 SEC filing, FB own about $3.6b in networking equipment (servers, switches, etc). This new way of using Facebook code will very likely just fit in to their existing infrastructure so they're using it a bit more efficiently. The cost in terms of hardware and connectivity is, essentially, already paid.
This is called: despair. Lost of monthly active users, Lost of daily engagement. I bet it'll fail, although everybody automatically think that it Will suceed.
If I had, Nasdaq would crash. And Facebook will do a lot before it happens. But is a economic natural Law: what doesn't grow, shrink. Facebook reached its limits, and it was delayed a lot by Instagram and whatsapp.
How do I create a separate username and password for my Workplace account?
To separate your personal account from your Workplace account:
Go to your Security Settings and click Sign Up Manually
Enter and confirm a New Password
Click Unlink Account
Note: Once your Facebook accounts are unlinked you'll have to log in separately to your Workplace account."
See other comments regarding employer being able to create an account via POST request. I'd assume that's the only way to create clean separation, even then I don't doubt they'll be able to fill in that gap!
Down the road, this should also integrate well with their VR plans.
There's quite a few companies they will not be able to sign up unless they provide an on premise solution (which I doubt they are interested int) and I have a feeling that even if they push the message hard it'll not be trivial to not have carry over privacy concerns (pretty important for enterprise software).
My gut tells me they should have released this as a completely separate entity to avoid fragmentation (I suppose this would also be the default positioning argument).
As an outsider it's also an interesting case of make vs. buy (MS-Yammer vs. Workplace).
I find it hard to believe that people believe Slack started the trend. There have been countless such services in the past. Back in the terrible dark ages of the internet, pre-2000, we used AIM to have those type of discussions. Was very valuable as we had development teams all over the country and was a quick way to determine who the expert was for a given question and get them into a conversation. If it was too cumbersome to hash out with them via messaging we would, god forbid, pick up the phone and have a chat.
People in "normal" non-techy workplaces are aware of and interested in Slack. Mainstream workplace group messaging in these sorts of organizations (which make up a lot more of the economy than the ones in our bubble) is a fairly new trend, which Slack deserves a lot of credit for.
This is a common mistake - the existence of technology is not the same as mainstream adoption.
I've been so very satisfied with how much of my personal data they sell to marketers thus far, I really want them to start tracking me at work too.
Hopefully they will pair the launch with an aggressive sales campaign targeted at people in HR so I won't get a say in the matter and it'll just be rolled out for my coworkers without our input. That would be just swell.
Facebook seems like exactly the company we want to trust with SSO and performance reviews and internal corporate communications. It's coming and it's going to be amazing!
You are being manipulated constantly, 24/7. By your friends, co-workers, family, acquitances, movies, songs, books, by yourself. This isn't really a valid reason, IMO.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Mark Zuckerberg said those things when he was 19 over a decade ago. He's now a father, the CEO of a global company with over 12,000 employees and one of the richest people in the world. Maybe he has matured since then?
What evidence do we have that he has matured? It's not a matter of being an immature college kid anymore. In many respects he has a financial incentive to abuse people's privacy now.
Maybe in business practice, not necessarily character. Just look at Trump. (Not to pick on him, but I don't find Trump to be practicing the etiquette I would associate with a man in his position. As for Zuckerberg, I'm not saying he's childish either. I'm just questioning your point.)
For most people, the thirteen years from age 19 to 32 involves a great deal of maturity and in many respects I imagine the same applies to him. But if he started out as somewhat unscrupulous, what evidence do we have that the pressures of having to appease investors is going to change that in a positive way when it comes to people's private information? Especially considering the kind of revenue that data can generate.
> Any evidence of FB going directly against their privacy rules
Whether or not they go against their own rules is a moot point, given their history of changing those rules and systems with little to no notice or documentation.
They've modified privacy multiple times and changed defaults so as to trick users into sharing more than intended. There was an article not long ago about privacy implications of sharing links in the messenger, as they store links in such a way as to track the history of unrelated people who also shared the link. Not to mention various issues with undocumented collection of private data on mobile devices.
Facebook isn't really a company deserving of third-party defense in the arena of privacy.
> I think it's fair to assume that going from a 19-year-old college kid to the CEO of a giant corporation involves maturing quite a bit
Flip side: going from 19-year-old college kid to the CEO of a giant corporation could also sharpen shark-like tendencies and compromise previously held morals.
That's usually a great defense if you're not talking about a person whose schemes only grew over time in both privacy violations and business gains. This is also the same guy who spends lots of time convincing users privacy doesn't matter and he should know everything about them while buying up homes all around his for his privacy.
He's definitely still playing the "if you need info just ask" cuz they're "dumb fucks" that "trust me" game. Just worth billions with his company making as much on the same game on a worldwide scale.
I am sure there is plenty of people who didn't think and say anything like that when they were 19, i.e. they were already mature.
Unfortunately, they have not much say in how FB is doing its business. Why are we giving MZ benefit of the doubt, when there is plenty of likely more mature people?
The differences in maturity between 19 and 31 are tremendous, while those between 60 and 70 are virtually non existent, so no, these cases are not quite similar at all.
For what it's worth, rental car companies won't allow drivers under 25 because their insurance companies have a wealth of data to demonstrate that's when reliable levels of independent judgement emerge. For the same reason, militaries prefer soldiers who are under 25.
"For what it's worth, rental car companies won't allow drivers under 25 because their insurance companies have a wealth of data to demonstrate that's when reliable levels of independent judgement emerge. For the same reason, militaries prefer soldiers who are under 25."
That's a very uncommon and great way to look at military recruitment. I've been focusing on the "not enough judgment for beer or voting but good enough for murder" angle but I think I might quote you too. ;)
The simple solution to anyone concerned about this is to just stop using Facebook. I've done so and it turned out to be a great decision. Contrary to the belief that you'll be "left out," people can and do get in touch with you for the important things. SMS, email, phone, snapchat, etc all work really well today, and you can get your social news fix from reddit, HN, and elsewhere if you need it. I've gotten measurably happier and more productive once I stopped using FB completely and haven't lost touch with any of my friends.
I went through the relatively laborious process of unfollowing every individual and group and now just use it to learn details of events, for other apps which require an account, and to prevent anyone from impersonating me by creating an account in my name (Although I'm not particularly worried about that one.).
I also deleted pretty much all personal details and locked down privacy and removed all posts, images, and tags.
You're absolutely right, it's a pleasure not to deal with that terrible newsfeed filled with so much misinformation and bad memes. I go on twitter a bit more but there you can curate a sweet list of incredible people in any field to follow.
I couldn't agree with you more. I did the same a year ago and couldn't be happier. To be honest it made me really close with friends that really matters in my life.
Having never used Facebook I find that I don't need it for most things.
But, there are some activities in which I'm involved where almost all discussion and event organisation takes place on Facebook. My participation has thus decreased significantly over the past decade.
The organiser of one such event (to which I've been going for years) mentioned to me recently that of the approx. 20 people giving presentations there I was the only one not on Facebook, requiring him to email me separately. Many people wouldn't make that effort any more.
I absolutely agree with you on what you said. But how do you deal with the problem, when you have to, say, create an event and make people aware of it? Are there any alternatives to FB?
that could work, if you already know all the people you want to invite.
but if you want to make people outside your circle aware of your event? like a hackathon or a party. This is the only thing that keeps me on FB, and it's very frustrating
Or you can just use a subset of it, where privacy is of no concern. Those craigslist-esque groups that have been popping up are immensely useful. Especially with the built-in messenger.
There is an interesting resistance, usually from US people, when it's a company; the debate nearly always ends up as "then don't use it", and that companies should be able to decide and do whatever people willing to allow the, by using the service.
These people usually refuse to see that FB has become a generic provider without regulation and competitor and in numerous cases you don't have the choice not use it. In my case, it's even in my workplace now. (Same workplace which is looking to migrate to Gmail from Exchange - and Cyrus before that - despite the countless business secrets that might be in mails.)
Quoting a person talks to everyone, even to those who trust a company no one should.
But thank you for these link, it kind of proves that the quote still stands.
If it's not clear that Zuckerberg has matured into a responsible leader since FB started, then I don't know what you've been reading.
And I'm saying this as somebody who has had major gripes with FB in the past, having worked on social games and had to deal with the platform and Credits.
I just want to give a shoutout to the subreddit "Stallman was right." [0]
Because if there's one thing that Stallman has consistently predicted, it's that if you give your private data to a firm, they will absolutely use it however they want.
So does the Mark Zuckerberg of today still have the ability to directly access that kind of information? What, if any, safeguards are in place? Asking because it seems kind of an obvious issue.
Why is this even part of the discussion. This was a long time ago and we have no objective proof that they are in the business of abusing privacy and trust. I'm all for a good discussion of multiple view points but not via something thats baseless. If he had shown signs of having no regard for privacy in recent times then fine. But he's time and time again spoken of privacy. Leaving all that aside, they are audited by a 3rd party. That cannot and should not be negated by some frivolous use of a person's statement when he was far less mature and handling far less responsibility. Let's not breed unhealthy conversation please.
I think its a perfectly valid part of the discussion. Facebook holds a great deal of power with the kinds of personal data they possess so I don't have a problem whatsoever holding them to the highest standard possible when it comes to private information.
Holding them to the highest standard and having a discussion is fine. Bringing up non applicable points from the past is not ok. The premise being made in that argument was "mark was untrustworthy as a student and therefore he should be treated with suspicion now". That premise is flawed as it has no logical connection to the present. If someone can bring proof that Mark still doesn't care about privacy and is cavalier about it, fine. That point doesn't do that. Therefore, it shouldn't be part of the discussion.
I think it's unfair to judge someone on what they said when they were 19 and just starting in the world. We were all kids once.
I'm quite certain that everyone in the world has said silly things at certain stages of their life that could be used against them and would paint their cause in a horrible light - and by everyone I mean visionaries like Nelson Mandela, The Dali Lama, etc. and of course your run-of-the mill leaders and inspirational people.
I've worked with many startups. Seeing the security practices of early stage products, I am astounded that anyone gives them data. It's horrifying.
Like, right now I have access to some 300,000 phone numbers. All I gotta do is run a shell command and then a SQL query. So can any other engineer in the company. I trust that none of us would use this access maliciously, but how many of our passwords have been leaked in various hacks? What if we're targeted for a hack? What if somebody gets fired and becomes pissy? Hell, what if someone suffers a psychiatric episode and does something stupid?
Situation has been the same at every startup I have ever worked at.
Anyone who gives their data to an early stage startup is not considering all the implications. Me included. I do it all the time. Gotta have all the shiny tools.
And that is of little concern to anyone impacted by such an abuse and of little concern to a 19 year old having a "Holy shit people trust me" moment. I had similar moments running my own stuff in college, if you quoted me out of context I would sound way eviler than Zuck's quote I'm sure. Power, even just a modicum of power, makes 19 year old say dumb shit.
That whole thing about impulse control and executive functions of the brain not being fully developed until you're 25.
The more important question is did he ever abuse that access? [in a way that isn't described in the TOS]
"The more important question is did he ever abuse that access? [in a way that isn't described in the TOS]"
The terms of service is one of those shrink-wrap style of licenses that gives them close to free reign. There's plenty of abuse and sneakiness of Facebook on record. He was fine with it all. He also wasn't 19 during most of it. He also still does things that contradict his profit-motivated claims like most scumbags do. Key one being lying about value of privacy while buying nearby properties to ensure his.
It's not that his opponents are taking one moment of an honest or halfway-decent businessman's past to paint a picture of his entire life. He's ensured that him being an ambitious, lying scumbag with a similar company is what we see him as despite the PR work. He tries hard to justify those actions over time. Then this bombshell dropped which fit totally with his actions over a long period of time to the present moment. As in, "screw everyone and get rich." It's just extra, more-specific corroboration of what seemed true all along.
That's why we're giving Zuckerberg so much shit over it. It clearly reflects who he is. He's simply a wiser, moderate monster now. ;)
Facebook has a storied history of firing their employees with no justification based entirely on what they say in private messages in Facebook internal. It's happened to close friends of mine. Companies that adopt the same platform will invariably be allowed to use the same unimpeded and unjust surveillance system. And as has been said in other comments here: this information will be more freely and directly available to the US Government, just as Facebook now builds tools specifically for the government to peruse private personal data.
An individual can opt out of Facebook in their personal lives relatively easily. But it is not an option to reject the primary communication tool of your business -- this platform has the potential of keeping conscientious objectors out of the workforce.
Interesting approach. I kind of like it, but then this information should be public, if ypu want actual good things to happen, and not stored in another private company.
even disregarding that completely. no one will trust facebook with their data. they see it as a toy for people to play with at a home. not a work tool. i see it working in silicon valley but good luck convincing IT managers in the midwest to switch from Microsoft.
Really, Pmlnr? Should we hold you accountable for everything you've said 10 years ago about your friends when they were not there, your spouse, your coworkers, everyone else. People change and the guy was a teenager at the time.
People brag sometimes trying to look greater than they are, so whatever.
If you are attacking someone then please do it on substantive issues. (something that can be prosecuted)
For example the fact that Facebook engages in censorship (as does Google and Twitter by the way) and actively pushes propaganda trying their best to manipulate the US election. That's a real issue that might lead to some people being sued or even imprisoned after the election if their candidate doesn't win.
Please stop posting this across the whole thread. The guidelines ask us not to introduce flamewar topics like this, and to do so with such volume is a serious abuse of the site.
Sexual assault? He said "they let you do it if you are rich and famous". Now that's real news. He didn't say that he'd force himself on them against their wishes.
You might feel it's scummy to think that way but claiming this is sexual assault is ridiculous.
"They let you do it" is not consent, it's the absence of fighting back. A woman does not have to physically fight her attacker for it to be assault. Consider the phrasing "they let you do it if you hold a gun to their head".
Ridiculous analogy. Being rich and famous (=high status, attractive mate) is nothing like holding a gun to someone's head (=threat of violence). A fairer comparison might be "they let you do it if you look like Brad Pitt". Is that less sexual assault-y in your book?
Apparently you have difficulty reasoning objectively about this issue. Let's agree to disagree and move on with life.
For you it's sexual assault because you imagine him attacking women without any warning while I on the other hand have no reason to believe that he isn't escalating sexually in a normal way, leaving room for women to say no or move a step back to signal a no.
Edit: When I think about it then I must be a sexual predator according to your definition. I cannot remember to have ever explicitly asked a women if I may kiss her.
Sorry, no. There is no universe in which "grab 'em by the pussy" is part of a normal escalation. We're talking (very plainly) about sexual assault. It's pretty sick to see people trying to defend this.
Of course it is at some point or didn't you ever touch a women? The problem is that you people all take Trumps words literally, but he isn't a politician and therefore he doesn't talk like one.
In related news, here's a story I just saw about multiple women accusing him of sexual assault http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-women-trump...
I mean, in case the previous public stories about his rape accusations, his use of his position at beauty pageants to go ogle naked women when they couldn't do anything about it, and his general tendency to abuse the power of his wealth and business roles wherever possible didn't seem relevant enough for you.
Companies probably wouldn't allow it in if it involved being distracted by your social "circle". That's why it doesn't. It's a completely separate account.
"Workplace" accounts are completely separate, with the exception of an optional link to your personal account to make it easier to log in. To my knowledge, no other data is shared. Your employer owns the data, not Facebook.
Will they support generic 2factor auth apps or will I have to use a separate Facebook workplace app to generate auth codes for logging in?
I'm already annoyed that I get my two factor codes from two different apps (one for Facebook, one for everything else), I'd be extra annoyed if it had to be three.
I dream of the day where I'm not followed around by my data exhaust. It's just wishful thinking.
I feel that the marginal benefit of social media systems has peaked. It's begun to make interactions less human and less personal; the gain over using email is negligible. I don't need to see your picture, I just want to know when I'll have VPN access.
The Workplace account exists completely separately of your private Facebook account. Can you point to specific evidence that suggests they're the same/linked or do you just "feel" like they would be?
Understanding software systems, there are any evidences that says it's separated? They use data from instagram and whatsapp, which they still call different companies. What would make us believe they aren't going to exploit it the same way they already do?
Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings.
[0]: http://www.slacklash.com/