Ideas

How to make Facebook “business Useful” – Business 2.0

Alas where the rest of you spend your time enjoying the tiny pleasures of life my mind drifts away to the thoughts of how to make better what is already great!

It got me thinking of what facebook is missing if it would want to become a more business orientated tool and take away the stigma or merely being just a waste of time and money.  Stats show that millions and millions of business pounds are being spent on wasted time of employees using facebook.  But with the application platform in full swing, surely business can potentially use facebook in a means that is productive.

Merely looking at the Microsoft Exchange suite, you have a setup of email, calendar, contacts, notes, RSS reader.  Considering that business tend to work with systems such as outlook then it got me thinking of how to convert facebook into something that functions with outlook.

Facebook already currently has an events application (calendar), messaging (email), friends (contacts).

With these items and a bit of tweaking I’m sure it could be possible to create an application with the following features:

1. Facebook SMTP – an SMTP server that is able to communicate in the normal ways but given an address of a certain format i.e. friend_name@facebook it would then know to relay the user information through the facebook platform to their facebook inbox.
2. Facebook POP – a rewritien POP server that gets the users messages from facebook and converts them into an email standard to be displayed in any POP email client
3. Facebook IMAP – Potentially one of the hardest, to be able to manage “live” through converting the facebook inbox into an IMAP style editable email box.  But considering POP, the need for IMAP is not necessary unless we can create folders in the inbox and be able to “upload” messages.  This would potentially be a bigger challenge
4. Facebook Contacts – this would use the friends list and be synchronised into your outlook by creating a vCard or something to that extent that can be imported manually, or a client side tool that allows automated synchronisation of the contacts, this would create contact details that are compliant with the Facebook SMTP system
5. Facebook Calendar – Again another means to synchronise your calendar and create events through either a client side plugin into outlook.  Ideally if you can emulate the whole exchange environment to take care of all of this you’d be in on a jackpot (development wide, but you could potentially be broke at the end!)
6. You can add the RSS feed to your Outlook that facebook already provides and now you have the minifeed available within your Outlook environment.

I guess the advantage of this is potentially less spam as the contacts are real and only people you know and know you can communicate with you through this system, it’s a system of trust that facebook has built and would allow for a better email experience overall.  But as facebook has yet to take over the Internet, you would still need to support the old methods thus until facebook is an Internet platform this plan would have to wait!

There could be many reasons for doing this and an advertising model can certinally be possible with textual adverts at the bottom of “emails” sent around, as well as exposure to the system that has been made.

If this was a tool out there would i use it? possibly, it all depends on how well it’s made and how much of my communication occurs with people on facebook, if more work contacts were to breach my rather protected circle of trust in facebook, then this could potentially be a very useful direction for facebook and business 2.0.

Tags: applications, business, facebook, Ideas, imap, Internet, outlook, pop