Facebook is reportedly working on a new website called ‘Facebook at Work’, bidding to compete directly with tech giants Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn in the professional communications area.
According to a report in the Financial Times, the social media giant has been using a similar service at Facebook offices, and “expanding this to other companies has been discussed internally for some time”.
Although Facebook wouldn’t comment on the story, it’s thought the new service will be a streamlined site, with personal ‘not safe for work’ material omitted.
As Facebook is banned in many workplaces due to it’s time-wasting capabilities among employees – 1.35bn people worldwide log on each month – this new service will presumably be targeting LinkedIn’s 90m monthly users, predominantly based in the office space.
“LinkedIn has become the dominant site for online business networking, but Facebook at Work could also challenge Google’s drive, email and chat products and Microsoft’s Outlook email service, Office software and Yammer, the corporate social network it bought for US$1.2bn in 2012,” according to the report.
This is not the first time a project like this has been described as planned at Facebook, with TechCrunch reporting on something similar during the summer.
There are obviously privacy issues Facebook would need to address for anything like this to become a success but, given the strength of the brand, a project like Facebook at Work could be a strong revenue stream for the company.
