Get a Room, the New Private Discussion App From Facebook

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The Facebook Creative Labs team rolled out Rooms today, a new stand-alone mobile app that’s designed to let people create small, topical watering holes on their mobile devices and then invite others to join. Josh Miller, who runs the project for Facebook, says the app was inspired by the forums, chat rooms, and communities of the early Web, but designed for the modern mobile era.

When you download the app, you have the option to join or create a new Room. Rooms are meant to be highly focused around particular topics, places, and events. You can create a room for, say, birding, or surfing, or vintage 1980s Hello Kitty collectables. You then create a description, customize it’s look and feel, and change the settings to your liking—for example you could change the “Like/Liked” action to “See/Seen” in a birding-focused room. To bring other people into your room, the app generates a QR code, and which you can share either one-to-one, or post publicly. This last step is both novel and very cool.

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Often, QR codes get a bad rap. They’re inscrutable and, well, kind of ugly. But in this case they make a lot of sense, because they’re image driven, and as Miller explains, images are the easiest things to pass around on a phone.

“Linking was the main way you found things in early web, but links are tough on mobile,” Miller explains. “If links were the easiest on web, photos are easiest on phone.”

It works like this: You generate a QR code invitation, which the app color codes to match the room you’ve created. You can email it or post it online or send an invitation from the app. The invitation has a prompt to screenshot the code and open it in the app, which will drop people in the right room. You can also print these up and post them on a wall or another physical space. It’s a very seamless experience.

Once you arrive in a room, you can set your identity to whatever you’d like it to be. You don’t have to use your real name. You can have different names from room to room, even. “You should be able to decide who you are in each room,” says Miller.

It’s another smart touch, and a recognition that we’re not always expressing exactly the same identity from place to place online. Sometimes you want to be fully anonymous. Sometimes you want your screen name to reflect something about your personality or interests (RollTide4ever). Sometimes you want to use the authority of your own full, true name. Rooms lets you do all those things.

The app is available on iOS today. There’s no Android version as of now.