Facebook Reveals New App called “Facebook At Work”

It was reported about 6 months ago that Facebook was working on a new product directed at the enterprise market under the working title, “Facebook at Work”. The product is officially revealed and the launch for the new iOS and Android apps called Facebook At Work is happening today. The “FB@Work” version will also be available on Facebook’s main website. This version will enable businesses to create their own social networks amongst their employees that are build to look and act like Facebook itself.

There are a lot of questions in the air regarding the product. Considering that it’s new and already anticipation is at a rise. The company has not yet come with the pricing for the app yet. Whether it will monetise the service through ads, or how third-party apps will work. It is still deciding on that. For now, Facebook Platform has been disabled on the Work product, meaning no ads or apps.

That may not always be the case (“It could be paid,” he says).

Employers can create separate log-ins for employees to use with their Work accounts, or users can link
these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place.

Here’s a run-down of some of the key points about the service, as told to me by Rasmussen:

Pricing. As noted above, no firm details on this yet but consider that most of the other apps offer tiers of
pricing. By making this free, Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network.

How it will work. Facebook wouldn’t show me a demo ahead of the launch but this is how Rasmussen
describes it: “When an employer adopts Facebook at Work, they can construct it with a set of new
accounts. Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both
at the same time.”

This would work much like Groups and public profiles do today. On mobile, you would have two mobile
apps running at the same time, he adds. “Even if the employee chooses to link there is no crossover. The
content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook.”

What’s not there/integrations . You can share documents today but for now there will be no in-app editing
“currently.”

Again, that leaves this open as something that will come down the line. “The set of features are identitcal
to personal Facebook, but just to get it out sooner we’ve disabled the Platform so the APIs that
third parties work with are not there, but we are keen to turn it back on. Hopefully in the future other
enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook at Work.”

Backstory on development . “I can say that the challenges of making work more efficient is something that has been on my mind for along time, and I come to it with a lot of passion and the knowledge of a failure of doing this at a different company,” he says, referring of course to Google Wave.

“I thought that maybe Facebook’s experience was what was needed. When I worked on search here it was
always at the back of my mind, so later I picked back up on that idea, joined in on the conversation.”

( Facebook At Work is now available for download on iOS, and we’ll update with a links to the Andrid
version once it’s live, though both are usable via a limited pilot to start with).