I imagine it has its own appeal as most people in non-tech industries where Slack is unheard of understand Facebook. Plus it has the double whammy of servicing linkedin-like features. The video shows a fabric company if that says anything about who they're targeting. I don't think the HN crowd is who they're after.

Yes, what stood out to me in the OP video is it is targeted to normals. Whereas Slack has a startup/tech following.

Also, FB for Work has the biggest advantage from an Enterprise Software ever: they've already pre-trained 2 billion of the world's population on how to use it via the consumer version. Why not take advantage of that?

I agree! Although, I am curious about some of the privacy concerns that are being raised.

To further your point, I think Facebook's timeline dynamic complements Slack quite nicely. Slack is great for broad, real-time communication, whereas Facebook posts can be much more hyper-focused and the conversation can revolve around the specific topic over a long period of time.

For example, we have a development channel in our Slack. I can go back and browse through the chat log, but it's awkward to contribute a suggestion or thought to a conversation that happened yesterday. Everyone has moved on. Not the case on FB.

What if some features of Google Wave are added to slack so that threaded conversations can take place.

I'm not too familiar Google Wave. I was thinking about it a bit more before I went to bed last night, and the internet has always had chat and message-board style communication. They've always been complementary.

Slack _could_ try to tackle this, but I feel like it would need to be a different format than the chat room and it would be moving away from their strength.

Can I search my chat history in FB? I've wanted to do that many times but I couldn't find it in the UI

Yes, it's in the top right corner of full conversation mode (i.e. facebook.com/messages/<id-number>)

But Slack is a chat service. I'm struggling to imagine what I would ever want to see in my Work News Feed.

I take it you've never used Yammer, which was created as "Facebook for work" seven years ago. The Yammer news feed is actually a great way to stay generally aware of what's going on in your company across lots of different groups or functions. I'm an engineer and its nice to see what sales and customer support are worried about from time to time and occasionally chimein when I can be helpful. At my company we use chat for quick, immediate conversations, and Yammer for bigger, more in depth conversations about product or architecture or various business tactics.

I imagine Facebook for Work would happily fill a very similar role to Yammer, sitting comfortably alongside chat. Of course, they'll probably have a much easier time with distribution given the brand recognition.

This is the first time I've ever heard someone speak positively of Yammer.

Haha, I'm not entirely surprised. The UI is pretty dated, and overall it can be kind of janky sometimes.

I'm curious though, what aspects of it do you usually hear people complaining about?

When the first rolled it out and signed everyone up at my office people complained all the time about the spam in their mailboxes. Then we figured out how to delete our accounts. Now the only people who use it are those that are trying to impress someone by giving the image of participation.

Think knowledge base, all that information trapped inside Email which requires people to answer the same question 1000 times. Each one incomplete.

You want to solve that? Think "Wiki", not "News Feed".

It appears that this Facebook Work thing also includes a private work chat system somewhat comparable to Slack.