Facebook has unveiled a new service to let businesses create social networks for their employees that look just like the popular socail media website.
With this new service, called Facebook at Work, employees can also get their own log-ins and link them up with their other profiles to access all of them at once, according to TechCrunch..
Lars Rasmussen, the engineering director at Facebook who is the leader of the project, said the company has spent the last 10 years developing Work, looking at what its own employees use to communicate with each other, share news, plan meetings and send documents.
"Facebook at Work's strength is that we've spent ten years and incorporated feedback from 1 billion active users," Rasmussen said. "All of that is embedded now in the same product but adapted from different use cases."
He added that Facebook's staff, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, currently makes use of the service, saying Zuckerberg uses it to post announcements.
While Work has similar features found in Facebook like News Feed, Search, Groups, Events, Messenger, and photo and video sharing functions, it has an interface that is shaded white instead of Facebook's blue, Wired reported.
Rasmussen said employees of companies that sign up with Facebook at Work won't need a personal Facebook to use the service. He added that greater productivity is another benefit of Work since Facebook's staff was able to use it to complete more tasks.
"You can get more stuff done with Facebook than any other tool that we know of, and we'd like to make that available to the whole world," Rasmussen said.
Another problem Rasmussen says Work solves is that it makes the social media site an acceptable tool to use at a job, Wired reported.
"Some people are less comfortable than others using their personal Facebook in the work context," he said. "With Facebook at Work, you get the option of completely separating the two."
Facebook at Work will be available on separate apps for iPhones and Android devices, and the company will launch a mobile web version as well.
