An Unlikely FREE Collaboration Management App
What if you had a completely turnkey solution for managing multi-threaded interactions with teams? What if this application handled scheduling, status updates, RSS feeds from collaborative blogs, group messaging, 1-to-1 messaging, photo and screen capture sharing, and more? What if it permitted secure group communication for people inside and outside of your company? And what if you didn’t have to convince your IT department to install it?
Sounds powerful, right? Sounds useful.
Facebook Does All This
Facebook started out as a college application where students could find each other, build digital renditions of their real-time social networks. (Beyond that, I’d recommend googling their history, as I’m just making it up). Where it is NOW is a clean, well-designed, open-to-3rd-party-applications platform that utterly blows away MySpace as a social networking tool.
But for business? Chris, you’re joking!
I thought about this today. Here’s what you get with Facebook and their 3rd party apps:
- Email client.
- Status client.
- Groups – which permits 1-to-many messaging, discussion threads, im-like interaction.
- RSS support to import your team’s blogs (Your team isn’t blogging?), wikis, etc
- Calendar / Event app.
- Twitter app.
- Flickr app.
- News feed that tells you what people in your “friends” (your team, in our case) have done differently with their account lately.
Am I Crazy Here?
This is a technology that accounts for a lot of what we might want in collaboration management, hosted on hordes of servers we don’t have to touch, at the cost of free, and probably the only thing an IT department might gripe about is sharing company info outside the firewalls. Is that a big issue to your organization? Then maybe this doesn’t work 1:1.
Go ahead, shoot holes in my theory. I thought it might be interesting to consider, at least. What do YOU think? Are you using Facebook? As a business?
Update: Daniel Johnson has a blog post and audio interview on a similar vein. Worth checking out.
Chris Brogan blogs at [chrisbrogan.com]
Tags: 
Loading ...
Comments
Daniel Johnson, Jr. says on June 29th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Chris, to clarify, the audio is from Total Picture Radio, in which the host, Peter Clayton, interviews Steven Rothberg from CollegeRecruiter.com. Steven talks about career strategies for social media and how companies are using them.
Damien Riley says on June 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Ok, finally a use for facebook!
Jason Peterson says on June 30th, 2007 at 12:13 am
The group feature on Facebook is still a bit weak. With the exception of Terms of Service questions, lack of a common file repository and a couple of security concerns, yeah, you could get some work done on the cheap.
How does this compare to 37 signals’ latest offering?
e says on July 2nd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
this might work for small startups or small organizations, but larger firms have to deal with confidentiality issues and because facebook (and it’s 3rd party modules for its platform) harvests user data, there could be significant legal ramifications for using facebook to conduct business.
Bev says on July 3rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
I love this idea particularly for the start ups we work with. We are looking at using it in our own business too.
I’ve also just done an essay as part of my teacher training qualification on how we could use Facebook as tutors to support our students.
Tim says on July 3rd, 2007 at 7:15 pm
This is exactly the type of thing Facebook wants everyone to do. They’re looking to build a “web OS” of sorts.
You’re playing right into their evil hands ;)
Stuart Willis says on July 6th, 2007 at 3:22 am
You could kind of use it for business – most people in my industry use it as a more personal replacement for linkedin.
However, I could imagine people writing backpack/basecamp to facebook plugins. You could see your to do lists, your milestones right within it. That’s cool.
Moosa says on July 19th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Well, I’d agree with you, although Google’s large application suite does all of that (probably better) and more, and actually even with the intention of providing a business solution…
http://www.google.com/a/
baldai says on August 17th, 2007 at 1:59 am
We are looking at using it in our own business too. I love this idea particularly for the start ups we work with.
hikayeler says on January 20th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
thanks
mirc says on March 15th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
thanx a lot
mirc says on March 15th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Successful website
Paddington Girl says on May 30th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
It was interesting reading that. Thank You