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]
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.
[...] Chris Brogan at Lifehack.org [...]
Ok, finally a use for facebook!
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?
[...] Facebook Does All This Source: An Unlikely FREE Collaboration Management App – lifehack.org [...]
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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/
[...] July 7, 2007 Filed under: Uncategorized — dmirams @ 10:29 am With a title like, An Unlikely FREE Collaboration Management App, I just had to read Chris Brogan’s post on Lifehack.org Friday. Have I missed one, I thought? [...]
We are looking at using it in our own business too. I love this idea particularly for the start ups we work with.
thanks
thanx a lot
Successful website
It was interesting reading that. Thank You
I wonder if they can make the business atmosphere collaboration more successful with apps and the ability to assign tasks and tick them off. Some project management plug in will be great.