Facebook has just recently launched Rooms, a new app that allows users to connect with other people all over the world anonymously. However, the two-day-old app has already gotten itself into some snags.
Damien Rottenberg, co-founder and chief technology officer of a company that launched a very similar app, alleges Facebook of stealing the idea of an anonymous message board for mobile users.
His company, Room, developed an app with the same name, which is currently available on Apple's App Store and was last updated in September. Much like Rooms, Rottenberg's Room allows users to create and customize their own chatrooms and invite other people to participate in anonymous discussions.
Rottenberg tells 9to5Mac that the company does not believe that the existence of Facebook Rooms is not a coincidence, given how similar the name and features are of the two apps.
"We're sure this is not a coincidence. We don't understand how Facebook, with all their lawyers, could have released an app with the same name and features," he says. "We won't let this happen and we want to defend all entrepreneurs with great ideas and visions."
Facebook took the wraps off Rooms, a standalone app that hopes to take us all back to the future. Rooms, unlike Snapchat, Whisper or any of the popular ephemeral messaging apps today, is the ultimate anti-Facebook app. While the social network has built its business on real user identities, its new app is all about allowing people to be who they want to be online.
"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," writes Josh Miller, head of the Rooms team. "Forums, message boards and chatrooms were meeting places for people who didn't necessarily share geographies or social connections, but had something in common. Places where what you said mattered more than who you were and whom you knew."
Those who participate in a Rooms discussion can join through private invitations by the discussion's creator or by taking a screenshot of a link to the discussion board. Rooms doesn't require anyone to use his real name, and users can have different usernames across different discussions.
However, unlike the web-based discussion boards of the early 1990s and 2000s, Rooms is aimed at the current generation of Instagram users by limiting the app to mobile only. It has settings that encourage the sharing of photos and videos. Rooms is currently available for iOS. No word yet has been made on when it comes to Android.
Users, however, have been having trouble downloading Rooms. A number of people have taken to Twitter to complain that they are unable to download the new app.
What happened to Rooms? Can't download it, despite it being listed in the App Store? #Rooms #Facebook #AppStore
— Drew Allen (@drewplaysdrums) October 23, 2014
cannot download rooms anymore...? pic.twitter.com/BMbO1wPzPK — Katsuya Saito (@viperbjpn) October 23, 2014
Rooms isn't the only Facebook app to run into copyright troubles. Earlier this year, the social network earned the ire of popular drawing app developer FiftyThree when Facebook released a similarly named app called Paper. An Instagram-released app called Bolt also ran into the same situation.
Rottenberg says he and co-founder Frank-David Cohen were assessing their legal options.
