As my colleague Mike Isaac wrote a couple of weeks ago, Facebook has been hard at work on a new app that allows people to post messages using pseudonyms.
Facebook took the wraps off the app, called Rooms, on Thursday. And it is far more like Reddit or Ning (remember that?) than Whisper or Snapchat.
Rooms is a publishing tool that allows users to create discussion boards on any topic they want, then invite others to join either through private invitations or by posting a public link. Participants can sign in with any user names they want, and they can change user names from room to room. The app asks for nothing up front other than a user name, although it strongly suggests you provide more as a security measure.
Each phone or tablet is assigned a random number, and the name a person picks for each room is associated with that number. That means other people cannot use the same name — Zuckersaurus, for example — in the same room, although they could use it in other rooms. The app requests an email address because if you want to sign in from another device or if you ever delete the app, it needs to send a one-time verification code for you to use as a password to gain access to all of your usernames and rooms from the new device.
Each room can be customized by color and other features. For example, you can change the like button to another icon and call it whatever you want. And the creator can set rules, such as whether every post has to be approved by a moderator and whether to allow the room to show up when people search for the topic.
In some ways, this is all very back to the future. Since the earliest days of the Internet, even before the web, there have been discussion groups on every topic imaginable. People, frequently strangers to one another and many using pseudonyms, posted messages on digital bulletin boards and chat rooms of various sorts.
Unlike the text-oriented message boards of old, however, Rooms is aimed at the Instagram generation. It’s accessible only via mobile app, and its look and feel encourages the posting of photos and videos, with caption-like text underneath. (For the moment, the app is available only on Apple iOS.)
“If links are the currency of the web, photos are the currency of mobile,” said Josh Miller, who leads the team that created Rooms. Mr. Miller’s start-up, Branch Media, was working on the technology when Facebook acquired the company this year.
The product has been in testing, with participants limited to Facebook employees and a limited number of outsiders. Some of the early rooms are devoted to quirky topics, like kendama, a Japanese toy.
Mr. Miller said the idea was to help people find others interested in the same topics, wherever they are.
“We don’t want this to be a place where you talk to friends,” he said. “There are many people out there that you didn’t go to high school with that you want to connect with.”
In fact, you can’t import friend lists from Facebook or any other service, although there is nothing to stop someone from posting an invitation link on a social network. (One potential stumbling block is that the links are visual, resembling QR codes, and generally require a visitor to take a screenshot or photo to get access to the room.)
Rooms is a departure for Facebook, which has its own discussion groups but generally requires people to use their real names. But Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has softened his early opposition to anonymous conversation, most notably by spending what ended up being $21.8 billion to buy WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app built around phone numbers, not names.
As with other projects emerging from Facebook’s Creative Labs division, there are no concrete plans for making money from Rooms. Mr. Miller said Facebook might make money by selling optional premium features — much like the blogging platform WordPress.com does — to upgrade individual rooms. And if Rooms does eventually incorporate advertising or some other revenue generator, he said he would like to find a way to share the revenue with individual room creators, as Google’s YouTube does.
The biggest question is whether there is room for Rooms on an Internet already overflowing with places to have conversations. Mr. Miller said the mobile orientation of the app should be more appealing than web-based competitors like Reddit.
But he acknowledged that building traffic might be slow going. “I’m going to troll the Internet and email people about it,” he said.