Facebook Launches ‘Rooms’ App for Anonymous Chats
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. “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.
“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. 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. You can also add photos and videos to a Room, making it a bit more lively than the text-only chat rooms of yore.
Even though Rooms comes from the Facebook Creative Labs, the app will not connect to Facebook.
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.
