In a throwback to the popular chat rooms of the mid-90s, Facebook today released a new app - dubbed Rooms - that will let you chat anonymously about topics that interest you.
Rooms has been updated for the digital age, of course. You access it on your phone (iOS only at this point) rather than dialing up from a desktop PC in your basement, and you can create and customize Rooms yourself.
"Early users have already created rooms for everything from beat boxing videos to parkour to photos of home-cooked meals," Facebook Product Manager Josh Miller said in a blog post. "There's even a room called 'Kicks From Above' that showcases photographs of cool shoes in cool places."
To sign up, you provide an email address. Even though Rooms comes from the Facebook Creative Labs, the app will not connect to Facebook.
"We may share information about you within the companies and services operated by Facebook to understand and improve our services, but the information you share on Rooms will never be posted to your Facebook account and the information you share on Facebook will never be posted to your Rooms account," according to a privacy statement from Rooms.
Once you're inside Rooms, you can select a different username for each room. "In my room for technology industry discussions I am 'Josh' but in another about backpacking travel I am 'jm90403' – a homage to my hometown ZIP code. Sometimes I want to go with my real name and sometimes I prefer a nickname. It depends," Miller wrote.
You can also add photos and videos to a Room, making it a bit more lively than the text-only chat rooms of yore. If you own a Room, add a cover photo, select colors, pin messages of note, customize member permissions, and decide whether your content can be linked on the Web.
Note, however, that information shared on Rooms is public. "This includes your usernames, comments, and photos," according to Rooms. "Anyone online or offline, including people off of Rooms, may be able to see this information. When you join a room, your status as a member of the room may also be visible to other Rooms users, such as the moderator of the Room."
The push for a more anonymous social networking experience comes after Facebook was criticized for requiring San Francisco-area drag queens to use their "real" names on the site. Facebook has long required people to use their real names on the site, but people frequently ignore that rule, and Facebook doesn't really do anything about it unless people complain.
That's what happened with the Bay Area drag queens. Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox confirmed that "an individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake." The approach, he said, "took us off guard" because most fake name complaints are legitimate. Facebook later apologized, and reports emerged that the company was working on an app that allowed for anonymous chats.
In the interim, however, a competing social network - Ello - cropped up, promising an ad-free experience that allowed for any name you liked. Earlier today, it reiterated that commitment and announced an additional $5.5 million in funding.
It's unclear if the usernames you select on Rooms are yours forever, or if there is a limit to how many you can have. At the moment, the Rooms app is on the App Store, but those who try to download it are getting an error. The Rooms team urged people to keep trying.
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