Fear drives Facebook to invade workplace
Taken to the office the ultimate distraction will lose its mischievous nature, I FELT so naughty joining a fledgling site called Facebook in 2005. I had been invited to join this mysterious digital club by a university pal. A mere week later and we were uploading photos of our every drunken adventure onto this new site — which at the time was used only by students in Britain and the US.
Facebook changed everything. It was the antidote to work.
Fast-forward nine years, one stock market flotation and more than a billion members later, and the internet’s enfant terrible now wants to help you work. Yes, the ultimate distraction is on course to help the “professional you” connect with your colleagues.
This new arm of Facebook will apparently help colleagues chat and “collaborate” over work documents — which actually means copying and pasting a few things.
There is an appetite for these sorts of tools in the office. The Microsoft platform Yammer allows this type of interaction and is reportedly used by more than 200 000 companies worldwide.
But two big questions remain: Why is Facebook trying to invade our offices? And do we want it in our professional lives?
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 30year-old founder, has done a phenomenal job of rewiring the social fabric of the connected world.
We now think it’s normal to post photos of our wives and girlfriends just before they give birth (Robbie Williams, I’m looking at you) and update our statuses with “humble brags” galore. (If you aren’t familiar with this phenomenon, it’s when a friend tries to pass off something pretty amazing as “totes normal”— such as landing a business-class flight upgrade.)
This is the man who, back in 2011, suggested that privacy was a societal norm of the past. His incredible efforts at Facebook have thus far proved him correct.
But do we really want him to shape our working life in the same way? A social network for the office is bound to lead to some cringeworthy social faux pas. It hardly bears imagining: some poor fool will post a photo of a dodgy kiss at a Christmas party, people will start boasting of their work achievements and others will feel pressured into “liking” their colleagues’ efforts.
Then there’s the issue of trust — a niggling thorn in Facebook’s side as it fights a European court battle over alleged data protection violations. An Austrian lawyer has brought a case against the company in what could be one of the largest class actions over privacy, accusing it of giving European data away to US spy chiefs at the National Security Agency.
Are we really expected to have faith in a company that has been known to change who can see private information about its users without their prior permission? You may not remember app-gate. This inglorious episode was when The Wall Street Journal discovered in 2010 that third-party services on the social network, such as the popular game Farmville, could gain access to Facebook users’ private data and had made this available to advertising companies.
The social network’s security record certainly leaves a lot to be desired
The social network’s security record certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
And so we come to the issue of why Facebook wants a piece of the professional pie.
In a nutshell: fear. It may have 1.35 billion monthly users but its growth has slowed. Zuckerberg is on an admirable mission to make sure Facebook keeps innovating so that it doesn’t suffer the same fate as Myspace and all those other big tech names that have withered and basically died.
After its disastrous stock exchange debut in 2012 (Facebook tanked almost immediately after flotation), the business has remained under intense pressure from Wall Street to make its offering more addictive than ever.
Going after our work lives may be an obvious opportunity, but it also sounds a death knell for the impish Facebook we all knew and loved. Although I applaud Zuckerberg for trying to pivot his business (as they say in Silicon Valley circles), if Facebook really does want in on the corporate space then he’s finally favoured the investors over us, the original poking procrastinators.
My verdict? Dislike. —