Facebook is interested in users relying more on its services while they work, TechCrunch reports, although not for time-wasting activities. Instead, Facebook’s London division is working on a “FB@Work” initiative that would turn some of Facebook’s existing assets into productivity tools meant to improve daily activities at work.
“We are making work more fun and efficient by building an at-work version of Facebook,” a source said. “We will touch code throughout the stack and on all platforms (web, iOS, Android, etc.).”
Apparently, the idea isn’t new inside Facebook, as the company moved back and forth on it for a few years now.
“I keep hearing rumors about this. This is one of the two projects that constantly get started and come close to being launched but have been cancelled at the last minute,” an ex-Facebooker told the publication. The other project the source referred to is a Facebook version for under 13 year-olds.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook is already used for work inside Facebook for various purposes, including communication and planning via Messages and Groups, image sharing via Pixelcloud and task management via an Asana-like tool built in house by the company.
Other companies are also relying on existing Facebook products to get the job done.
“Facebook Groups and Group Messaging have already been transformative for how we communicate and collaborate at Hearsay Social,” Hearsay Social CEO Clara Shih said. “As a social media software company, we know 100% of our employees are on Facebook. Rather than reinvent the wheel or ask employees to login to yet another system, we decided to create a private, unlisted Facebook Group to house many of our real-time company chats and conversations.”
Lars Rasmussen, who previously worked on Graph Search for the company and on the Google Wave collaboration product that Google canned years ago, leads the engineering team in London that’s supposedly working on FB@WORK.
It’s not clear when this Facebook for enterprise project will be unveiled or what special features it’ll have to offer.
