Facebook is currently developing a new social networking website that aims to directly compete with LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft in capturing the attention of more than one billion potential users based inside the workplace, Financial Times reported.
The new site, called "Facebook at Work", is being built to enable the social network to be used by employees to communicate with co-workers, establish professional contacts, and even team up to work together on documents. Similar features are already available with Google Drive and MS Office.
The office-oriented site will keep the same theme and features as the original, with a big difference in that users will now be able to build and maintain a work identity separate from the personal profile page they use for family photos, funny videos, and other content not appropriate to or relevant to their business or occupation.
John Glenday of The Drum sees it as a move that the site ultimately needs to do, since Facebook has reached a "saturation point in many developed markets, prompting it to seek alternative traffic generators particularly in the nine to five period when many employees are actively discouraged from logging onto social networks."
"Facebook at Work would keep your drunken updates and embarrassing selfies away from your colleagues and professional contacts," writes Rich Trenholm of CNET.
Facebook users usually use the site to find, communicate and keep in touch with family and friends. While there are business-related pages, of course, they mostly serve as "public-facing pages for communicating with customers," says Trenholm, as opposed to being used by employees and companies as an internal hub for communication and collaboration.
Facebook's plans to build this kind of site was first reported by Tech Crunch back in June this year, citing an anonymous source that said Facebook was "working on a way to put the social network into a more positive light in the office."
The article also said that Facebook employees already have a similar system in place, and they have been using the site for internal communications.
"Everyone at Facebook uses Facebook for work. Most of their communication and planning is done though Messages and Groups. It would be a pretty natural thing to try to expose this way of using Facebook to get things done at the office to the rest of the world. It's a really fast and efficient way to get things done," said the source.
