The Rooms team describes the app as a return of the early days of Internet when people were used to discuss on some specific topic through chat rooms and message boards. You need to write or search the chat room of your interest and enter the room to participate in the discussion. Rooms app is the more advance version of the same concept, allowing people to create a room on any topic and invite others to join the room and contribute. It also allows you to customize the look, functionality and privacy of the room. The room could be customized with colors, icons and photos, even like button can also be changed.
According to Josh Miller – leader of the Rooms team,
“A room is a feed of photos, videos, and text – not too different from the one you have on Instagram or Facebook – with a topic determined by whoever created the room. Early users have already created rooms for everything from beat boxing videos to parkour to photos of home- cooked meals. There’s even a room called “Kicks From Above” that showcases photographs of cool shoes in cool places.”
Just like Instagram or Facebook, A Room is a feed of posts on a specific topic. A user can join the room with any name but they cannot connect their Facebook account with this app. Even one person may have two different names for different Rooms. I can join the tech room with name “Tony Stark” and when I am joining the James Bond fan room, I can keep my identity as “TS007”. You don’t need to keep your identity same while using this app. Privacy and security is the best feature of this app. You can restrict certain people to join the room by creating the community criteria. You can also stop Google from accessing the user-generated content through the App.
How could I build the community in the Room?
Once you have created the room you need to tap on the invite button to start inviting people personally or publicly. The app will provide you the unique QR code image once you tap on the Invite button. You can text that image to others or share that image publicly to ask people to join the room. The recipient simply needs to save that image in camera roll and open the app. The application will automatically (If you have allowed) find that QR image from the camera roll and will add recipients to the Room. If you have not allowed the app to access the camera roll you can manually add the QR image in application and join the room. You can also take the image from the physical world and save it in camera roll to join the room. This process looks quite complicated, but this app doesn’t have the search feature as of now. So it is hard to find which room to join and which room not to for now. This feature might be simplified in upcoming updates.
Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of the Facebook has adopted the strategy of making the family of the mobile apps beyond just Facebook. This new app is the strong addition in the apps by Facebook along with Instagram and WhatsApp. “Communities are just as addictive as things like Facebook.” – Said Josh Miller. If rooms will manage to create more personal and accessible discussion groups; it could be the next Facebook that is specific to the topic.
