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.