Facebook’s Rooms – the Return of BBS?

Facebook has just unveiled its latest innovation, seemingly inspired by the “social network” of the internet’s golden age: Rooms, an app that gathers its users around a common interest. Similar to Instagram or the usual Facebook, Rooms is a stream of photos, videos and messages, but all of them centered around a single topic chosen by the creator of the room. And it’s anonymous. For now, the app will only be available on iOS, but it will get an Android and desktop version in the near future.

Rooms functions in a similar fashion with the bulletin board systems of the “golden age” of the internet. These BBSs were computer that people could dial in to, log on, upload and download software, read news, post announcements and chat with other users. These bulletin boards were usually topic-oriented, and are generally considered to be at the origin of forums, blogs and social networks, or basically the world wide web as we know it today.

Unlike Facebook, Rooms users will not be required to use their real names, as Josh Miller, project manager of the new service has hinted a few days ago. According to him, this will be a return to the old times when the internet was mostly used to gather in forums, message boards and chat rooms, hidden behind pseudonyms, to discuss things people have in common. Today people spend more time on their phones, and are drifting away from the idea of connecting with unknown people over the internet. Rooms will offer exactly this – a way to connect with others not based on personal acquaintance, but on a common interest.

Rooms has grown out of Miller’s Branch, a company offering discussion group service, acquired by Facebook for $15 million this January. The service offered by Branch offered Twitter users a simple way to have discussions. Miller has declared, when joining the social giant, that his goal was to build Branch at Facebook scale. And he has – Rooms is like having a Facebook group on your smartphone, where people can choose how much of their real identity they reveal, and can discuss their common interest freely and anonymously.