23 Oct Facebook launches Rooms for iOS, its first anonymous app
Despite building its entire existence around real identities, social network giant Facebook today unveiled Rooms, its new anonymous app. The project was created by the Facebook Creative Labs team.
In the new app, users can create individual chatrooms around various topics they’d like to discuss, customize the color and design, invite others to join them via QR codes that can be shared, and hold anonymous discussions within the room. In a post on Rooms’ blog, Facebook’s product manager Josh Miller writes:
A room is a feed of photos, videos, and text – not too different from the one you have on Instagram or Facebook – with a topic determined by whoever created the room. Early users have already created rooms for everything from beat boxing videos to parkour to photos of home-cooked meals. There’s even a room called “Kicks From Above” that showcases photographs of cool shoes in cool places.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has dabbling in popular social app concepts pioneered by others. Facebook launched Poke back in December 2012 as a first shot at a Snapchat clone. After Poke went nowhere, it launched Slingshot in June this year.