Like Facebook, but without all the fun

The newest splash in the “Facebook in the Enterprise” race is a facebook application called “WorkBook” from a company called WorkLight.

WorkBook is apparently part of the WorkLight platform, and pricing starts at $10/user/month.

Some coverage:

• WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises (Dan Farber on ZDNet blog - with a photo)
• WorkLight enters the Enterprise Facebook Market (Bill Ives at Fast Forward Blog)
• WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work (Andrew McAfee)
• WorkBook Brings Facebook Inside the Firewall (Web Worker Daily)

McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:

In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.

But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?

Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x

This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna turn it off

In case you live under a rock or haven’t read news in ~2 weeks online, Facebook Beacon is an application which allowed third-party web sites to access your Facebook cookie and post messages to your activity feed regarding your purchases.

For example: “John bought Finding the Perfect Job at Amazon.com” - how would you like your boss seeing that one in your activity feed!

(Note: I don’t believe Amazon actually participated - it’s just an example. Jeff, please don’t sue me).

Well, the powers that be at Facebook have finally publicly apologized for the whole snafu.

In what is becoming a bit of a tradition, Zuckerberg addressed the angry multitudes directly in a blog post titled “Thoughts on Beacon“:

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

They also created, and Zuckerberg linked to, a single global setting enabling you to block beacon: Privacy Settings for External Websites

Even this setting is a bit difficult to understand, though, since it appears to say that you will still recieve notifications on those third party sites that they are requesting to send stories to Facebook:

Show your friends what you like and what you’re up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile.

Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.

So when I check the box marked “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile,” am I still going to have to decline individual stories?

One assumes not, but I guess they haven’t had time to change the interface the external providers use, so they will still make requests.