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'Office Facebook' firm Tibbr wants you to PAY for mobe-meetings app

Great idea. Punters won't cough for it though

Tibbr, the social network designed for use at work, now integrates with online meetings for both mobile and desktop clients as it continues to argue that a social workplace is worth paying for.

The idea is to let Tibbr users throw together Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting sessions and Skype conference calls with a couple of clicks. It is also about making Tibbr the workplace home screen and justifying its place as one of the few social networks for which users are expected to pay.

The competition is Yammer, for which Microsoft paid $1.2bn a year ago and has been busy integrating into Office 365. Yammer is focused on messaging and microblogging, while Tibbr tries to recreate the Facebook experience with event groups, sharing of photos and files, exchanging pictures of cute cats and dissing each other's choice of hat – albeit only within the office and without adverts, all in exchange for a corporate-level fee.

30 per cent of Tibbr customers even host the content locally, on their own physical servers, which should keep the NSA at bay, but the rest use Amazon's cloud in the usual way.

Last month Tibbr re-launched its mobile apps, adding a Like button (in the form of a thumb) and the ability to process certain actions, such as approving expenses. The update integrates virtual meetings into the Tibbr experience – as long as they take place within a Google Hangout, a Skype call or a GoToMeeting session.

The problem for Tibbr, and anyone else planning to socialise the workplace, is user expectation – the experience, on mobile and desktop, has to compare to Facebook and LinkedIn.

Maintaining that user experience while extending Tibbr's capabilities into enterprise-level apps is an expensive process, which is why Tibbr is something that has to be paid for – or so we're told. ®

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