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Facebook’s new Rooms app is weird, and it isn’t long after installation that you figure out why. You don’t log in with your Facebook credentials. Facebook is based on getting people to share everything — their names, their faces, who their friends are, where they are right now. But Rooms, a new app the company released Friday for iPhone and iPad, is designed for just the opposite: to let people connect without even having to introduce themselves.
Rooms recalls the forums, message boards and chat rooms of the earliest internet discussion groups. Users can create “rooms” based on a particular theme or interest — hiking, say, or Korean cooking. Rooms are virtual meeting places where any other users can congregate to discuss the room’s topic. What makes them so different from talking about something on Facebook is that you adopt a handle, or nickname, as the app refers to it, every time you enter a room. Whether that is your real name or a clever alias is up to you. In each room you can create your own username and identity, and post or comment with friends or strangers about anything from minimalist furniture to Kendama or Destiny.If you receive an invite, in order to enter a room, you must either take a screenshot of the invite on your phone or snap a photo of it with the phone’s camera.
Like on conventional message boards, you can set moderators, pin posts, set age restrictions, type out some ground rules for posting, and boot bad members. You can set a wallpaper and theme, and even alter the “Like” button that appears below posts to be another verb. But Rooms has no connection to Facebook or your Facebook friends in any way.
The app does not load your identity or connect to your contacts. There is no “sign in with Facebook” option. However, make no mistake: this isn’t an anonymous chat or discussions app, as some speculated Facebook was building. It turns out that Snapchat and Secret aren’t the only apps Facebook’s eyeing as it grows its portfolio of social experiences.
Rooms is all about building identity, but just outside the context of the world’s largest real identity service (Facebook). Rooms is perhaps most like Reddit, the web’s town square for discussing specific interests. But Rooms forces you to create a different identity for each room you’re in, and offers no front page or ranking system — yet, at least. For now, Rooms have chronological feeds, just like Instagram and Facebook.Facebook is based on getting people to share everything — their names, their faces, who their friends are, where they are right now. But Rooms is designed for just the opposite.
To invite you to a room, I tap “invite,” which generates a QR code image that looks like a square movie ticket. Then, I text you the image. You simply save the image to your camera roll, and when you open Rooms, the app adds you to the room automatically. How? Rooms, like every other social app, asks for access to your camera roll. Each time you open the app, Rooms scans your recent photos for QR code invites, then automatically adds you to the corresponding rooms. If you’d rather do things manually, you can always tap Use Invite in the app and choose the QR code image, or even take a photo of a QR code you found in the real world.
The app is set up as a feed of rooms. The constant stream of photos, videos and text looks much like what you see as you scroll through Instagram. Users can customize their rooms’ wallpaper colors and choose an icon and phrase to represent a unique version of a “like.”
Users can choose to make their rooms public or by-invitation-only. Invites come in the unusual form of QR code on a colored background that can be shared via email, text message, over social media or printed out on a sheet of paper. (Printouts: Another blast from the past.)
If you receive an invite, in order to enter a room, you must either take a screenshot of the invite on your phone or snap a photo of it with the phone’s camera.
Facebook is “working closely with a small set of community builders,” to create the first round of rooms, according to the Rooms blog. This will keep growth relatively slow, and makes invitations a necessity for new users.
For now, the free app is only available for iOS devices.
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