Keeping up with the likes of Socialcast and Yammer, Facebook is all set to launch Facebook at Work – a work-oriented product of the social media giant, that has silently been undergoing test runs for almost a year now. Facebook at Work has a similar interface to the regular Facebook experience, with similar tools (no Games, though) and tweaked privacy and profile settings to suit your work roles better. With Facebook at Work, work conversations, documents and sharing can be kept between employees, allowing your regular profile to be strictly about family and friends.
With Facebook already being used for work by media houses, startups, enterprises and ventures alike, Facebook at Work will aim at streamlining the social media experience further, thereby tuning profile visitors and contacts better than filtering through a combination of friends and colleagues. A major advantage that Facebook at Work will have over other professional social networks is that a massive section of the world’s population is already used to the way Facebook functions – its tools, elements and options. Facebook will be hoping that this gets people filtering content appropriately depending on usage, thereby leading to a cleaner, better social media experience.
The service is expected to commence some time in 2016, and for employees to avail Facebook at Work, company administrators will need to set up a network for their own employees, and oversee profile creations, groups, posting activity and such particular details. This will be another serious push by Facebook towards more ‘serious’ aspects, joining its departments like FbStart, Internet.org, Free Basics, and the likes. Facebook already has been investing in multiple sectors, with major focus on providing free internet across the world, be it via the ‘essentials’ of Free Basics, or by sending a carbon fibre drone into the atmosphere to beam internet connectivity down to Earth – a project that has been called Aquila.
Aquila is Facebook’s solar-powered drone that aims to form a network of similar unmanned flying objects, partnering with service providers to beam internet connectivity via lasers to rural and semi-developed areas, that still remain plagued with sparse internet connectivity. With the launch of Facebook at Work, Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild is ensuring Facebook’s presence in almost every essential aspect that are crucial for our lives – socialising, work, and Internet.