Social media has exploded in the past 10 years. While it was commonplace for a user to have one or two social accounts a decade ago, now nearly every facet of technology is social. People have logins for their health devices, linking you to your peers to try and be the fittest person possible. A lot of organizations and videogames even have tacked-on social support as an afterthought, just to increase the reach of their products by word of mouth. Rooms is the newest effort by Facebook to expand in this space they helped crowd, but right now we’re not really sure it’s worth connecting with.
The idea of Rooms is to hearken back to the old days of online communication, where simple chatrooms were king. Users could log on, find a topic they were interested in, and talk about it. To accommodate, the app has a degree of anonymity to prevent people from knowing your identity (unlike Facebook)—you can choose to remain nameless or go by an online callsign.
It’s a neat idea, but the actual chatrooms are a bit scarce currently, no doubt due in part to the growing pains of the app. Some of the biggest rooms have very little actual interaction or worthwhile content, and the “like” and comment ratio is fairly thin.
