Facebook isn't the place for masquerades and pseudonyms, but the social network's newly-launched Rooms app apparently offers such accommodations.
While Facebook was tightening and tweaking its naming policies, which requires users to stay true to offline identities, the social network was apparently also busy working on an app that would facilitate pseudonyms and anonymous exchanges.
That app is Rooms and Josh Miller, a Facebook product manager, says the new platform is a nod to the early days of the Internet.
Back when gas could be bought for way less than $2 a gallon, an incoming phone call could disrupt an Internet connection and the things users said online mattered more than who they were there were chat rooms. Rooms is an effort to recapture some of the magic of that latter technology in use -- but Miller says it isn't a chat room or even a Whisper clone.
"It doesn't matter where you live, what you look like or how old you are -- all of us are the same size and shape online," states Miller. "This can be liberating, but only if we have places that let us break away from the constraints of our everyday selves. We want the rooms you create to be freeing in this way."
Rooms are sort of like themed Facebook timelines shared by the creator with other users. Creators build and then moderate the rooms and can customize room decor, according to Miller.
"Rooms is designed to be a flexible, creative tool," states Miller. "You can change the text and emoji on your like button, add a cover photo and dominant colors, create custom 'pinned' messages, customize member permissions, and even set whether or not people can link to your content on the web."
Some of the rooms already designed and decorated include "City Gardens," "Street Style," "Pug Lovers," and "Makeup Mastery." A room can take on any theme and users can even wear whatever alias they like when they enter a room.
"You can even create different identities for different contexts," Miller states. "In my room for technology industry discussions I am 'Josh' but in another about backpacking travel I am 'jm90403,' a homage to my hometown ZIP code. Sometimes I want to go with my real name and sometimes I prefer a nickname. It depends."
Right now, the Rooms app is only available on iOS. Miller says Android and desktop versions of Rooms are planned. No word yet on how Facebook may handle advertising and efforts to track users' conversations for advertising purposes, if at all.
