All about Technology: Facebook introduces Rooms, a new community space outside of itself

Thursday 23 October 2014

Facebook introduces Rooms, a new community space outside of itself

Facebook has been aiming to become the center of all internet conversations and it's latest ploy to accomplish this goal is a new app called Rooms.

The Rooms app aspires to recreate chat rooms and forum discussion boards of internet yore in which a community of like-minded users could talk about subjects through the anonymity of the web.

Rooms not only allows you to take on a pseudonym, it also does not require users to log in with their Facebook account or even an email address.

Once you're in the app you can create discussion rooms dedicated to any topic you want whether it's about sharing photos of home cooked meals, parkour videos or the finer points of good beat boxing.Through these rooms users will be able to communicate with photos, videos and text.

Talk amongst yourselves

If you're the owner of the room you can also customize the feel the room by adding a cover photo as well as changing the colors and text of the discussion board. Taking a page our of forums, the room administrator can also pin posts and assign users as moderators.

Joining a room, however, is a slightly more complicated issue as invites are shared through a QR code. Unless the room has been set to public, the only way to join is to take a snapshot of QR code invitation or the owner sends you a message with the invite.

Rooms can also automatically access the iOS camera roll for unscanned QR codes and sign you into the corresponding rooms.

Freedom to be who you want to be

Josh Miller and his team from Branch developed the Rooms app in Facebook's Creative Labs program after the social network acquired the company in January.

Miller explained in a blog post he wanted to create a new space on the internet that allows everyone be whoever they want to be. "It doesn't matter where you live, what you look like or how old you are – all of us are the same size and shape online," Miller wrote.

"From unique obsessions and unconventional hobbies, to personal finance and health-related issues – you can celebrate the sides of yourself that you don't always show to your friends," Miller expounded in the same blog post.

Jumping ship

Rooms is an interesting new development from Facebook as the app exists completely outside of the social network. Creating trending topics hasn't produced intense community discussion as hashtags like gamergate on Twitter cultivates and so Rooms could be a new strategy.

Rooms also provides Facebook a new way of getting away from itself as the company recently backpedaling on its real name policy. The social network has been under fire between apologizing to the LGBT community and the recent rise of Ello.

Rooms is available for iOS in the App Store, though, there are reports the app has become unavailable and we ourselves had problems downloading it.