Former Facebookers launch Asana, a “modern way to work together”

Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, two former Facebook engineers, have launched Asana, a tool for helping people work together on projects and get things done.

Moskovitz (pictured) worked on Facebook when it was still a side project running out of a dorm room. Rosenstein was one of the company’s engineering managers and was responsible for such recognizable features as Facebook’s Like button.

While both co-founders were employed at Facebook, they helped design the company’s internal collaborative task-tracker. But, as Rosenstein noted in a recent blog post, “In general, good tools for staying in sync just haven’t been built and made available to the world.”

Asana, the new company the duo started working on in 2009, bills itself as “a modern way to work together.” The site launched today.

Asana uses a collection of tools to help teams collaborate on tasks, track their progress and communicate in real time about their work.

This brief demo video explains more about Asana’s specific tools and features:

“We began our private beta a year ago, and today thousands of people in hundreds of organizations are relying on Asana to organize their teams and their tasks, and to do some truly great things,” wrote Asana staffer Kenny Van Zant on the startup’s blog.

The service will be free for teams of up to 30 members and includes mobile applications for smartphones and tablets.

“Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake,” said Rosenstein. “When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.”

During 2009, the Asana team raised $10.2 million in two rounds of funding.