Name: Facebook makes room for anonymity
Uploaded: 2014-10-24
Duration: 1 min 44 s
Description: Facebook makes room for anonymity

Facebook's research division, the people who brought you Paper and Slingshot, unveiled their latest app, Rooms, Thursday. It's a group based social networking app focused on small communities and anonymous identities. Rooms bills itself as a mobile focused version of early chat rooms and forums. Users group up in to micro communities, the rooms, and share photos, videos and text in a communal feed. Which can be easily moderated. The rooms are invite- only and spread through QR codes, theoretically making each group as private or as public as the creator wants it to be. Rooms' other big selling point is its pseudonimity. Rooms users don't have to go by their real names and can use whatever name makes you feel most comfortable and proud. And even create different identities for different contexts. The ability to mask your own identity on Rooms has drawn a lot of comparisons to other anonymous social apps. Notably Whisper and Secret, but [ UNKNOWN ] Joh Miller, whose startup Branch was by Facebook last year, says the app is more about building communities than protecting anonymity. In an interview with TechCrunch, Miller said Rooms is trying to create the same ecosystem of the early Internet. Where each place looks very different from the previous one. We behaved very different. What we talked about was different there, and you could also bring a different side of yourself. But the idea that a Facebook product isn't tethering users to their real names is getting a lot of buzz. Mostly because of the company's previous missteps in that field. Facebook witnessed a mini exodus last month after its real name policy inadvertently targeted drag queens for using their preferred pseudonym. The social network has since apologized and promised to relax its rules. And a slash gear writer notes the rooms " reminds me of Google + communities ," which is probably not the comparison you want your app to start off with.