Remember the internet relay chat rooms back in the 90s where the world first turned into a global village? Well, Facebook has brought back the 90s chat room glory with its latest app for iPhones.
The application, Rooms, now available at the iTunes App Store, is an anonymous virtual chat room, which requires only an email address to sign in. There is no need to share your real name or location at the Rooms. The application allows its users to create different virtual rooms within the application for different subjects of their choice.
The chat rooms require their creators to send QR codes (2D barcodes) to others to invite them to join a specific room. The moderators/creators of the rooms can block any phone devices from joining their rooms, can require approval for posting content and can ban any user they want.
The rooms allow the members to write/share text and visual content including images and videos and also, link content to/from the outside world, depending on the creator’s preferences.
Watch how Room App works:
Josh Miller, the Facebook Product Manager, claims that Rooms is an inspiration of the early internet chat rooms saying, “One of the magical things about the early days of the web was connecting to people who you would never encounter otherwise in your daily life … Forums, message boards and chat rooms were meeting places for people who didn’t necessarily share geographies or social connections, but had something in common.”
While Rooms is inspired by the 90s chat rooms, it boasts of all the capabilities that smartphones now allow. It is like an upgraded version of the old chat rooms with the ability to have cover photos, set colored themes and change the look of room buttons.
The anonymous feature of the Rooms seems like a response of Facebook to its real name policy that lead to the shift of traffic to other social networks. Currently, the app, rated two stars out of five, is only available at iPhones and is slated for an Android release in early 2015.
