Facebook’s Room Service
The company has a new app for mobile forums. And It’s. Not. A. Social. Network.
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Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks incessantly about “the social graph.” His dream, a huge part of which has already been accomplished, is to create technology that allows users to connect with all the nodes in the theoretical galactic construct that represents the dense web of people you know in various capacities. So it’s worth noting when his company releases an app that veers widely from that principle, as well as other long-held Facebook precepts.
That’s why Rooms, released today on iOS, is kind of a Bizarro Facebook. Rooms is designed to generate ad hoc forums on a limitless number of subjects, but it couldn’t be more different than Facebook features like, say, Groups. For one thing, Rooms is all about connecting people who don’t know each other at all, even if you couldn’t find them on your social graph with a Hubble. Also, whereas Facebook itself is hard-core about its users operating under their real identities, Rooms lets its users assume not one but multiple pseudonyms. And while many thousands of apps use Facebook’s sign-in to assign user ID’s and get them in touch with their contacts, this latest app from Facebook itself snubs its nose at the idea.
Josh Miller, the app’s key creator, insists that this isn’t crazy, but a logical step for Facebook. Though only 24, Miller is an aficionado of the forums, chat rooms, and discussion systems of the early Internet; he’s kind of a geek version of a young person obsessed with the Beatles. It is a passion he acquired when he embarked on a career in the tech field after studying sociology at Princeton, a journey that began when he heard a speech by the Robert Putnam, the author of a book called Bowling Alone. The tome famously lamented the disappearance of community groups. When Miller engaged Putnam after the talk, the social scientist directed him to Meetup, a tech startup devoted to rebuilding such communities. “Wow,” Miller thought, “you can use the Internet to meet people you don’t know!”
Miller worked for Meetup, then co-founded a startup called Branch that enabled group discussions. (Disclosure: Branch was funded by Obvious, the parent company of Medium.) Earlier this year, Facebook bought Branch for an undisclosed sum; it was mainly a talent aqui-hire. Within weeks, Miller was in Mark Zuckerberg’s office for a one-on-one. They talked about Miller’s passion for forums and groups, and figured out that if you added up all the people in those online conglomerations, you’d get a humongous number—certainly one worth Facebook’s attention. Miller began to figure out how to build something at Facebook that was in keeping with his obsession with electronic forums.
Drawing on his self-conjured nostalgia for the days of online pioneers, Miller eventually identified three aspects of the earlier Internet and web now in danger of being eclipsed in the age of mobile and apps. The legacy web gatherings were distinct places — when you were on the Well or Metafilter, you felt you were somewhere, the online version of a “third place” after home and work. Also before the mobile movement, things were more customizable — you could tweak the look of your software to your liking Finally, when Internet was just rising, identities were fluid; people could chose a different persona for every activity and website.
Rooms, a product of Facebook’s Creative Labs, tries to sustain all three of those endangered aspects. Basically, it’s a platform to create discrete spaces where people can share pictures, videos and texts on a subject of shared interest.
It’s easy to begin a room and label it with a topic. With a few swipes, creators can customize the room, not only with colors, design elements and bountiful array of emojis, but by the rules of engagement: Can anyone post without moderation? Do you want the contents discoverable or blocked from search engines? Is the room age restricted? In essence, each room is its own experiment, where the creator (or appointed moderators) has a lot of control over how the forum operates. Users have power too: they are free to tweak the way they view the rooms as well.
Perhaps Rooms’ most innovative feature is the method by which newcomers are invited to a room. Creators of a room choose a photo as an invite and send it potential participants, or simply publish it somewhere. Secretly embedded in the photo is a code that permits entry. When the recipient gets the photo, she takes a screen shot. The next time that person uses Rooms, she is instantly transported to that room.
The process can even be done partially offline: print the image and post the paper to a bulletin board (maybe where your Yoga class or Occupy cell can see it). People can take a picture of it, save the pic as a screen shot, and then use Rooms to continue the physical gathering offline. Or an author can print an invite in a book, so that readers can go to a room to discuss the contents.
While Miller talks rhapsodically about the dense prose of early conference rooms like the Well, Rooms seems more geared to the quick-capture, low-attention span of a mobile generation. Most of the examples he showed me were centered around an image or video with just a soupçon of text. In that sense, the rooms one might find in the app are more akin to a group-generated Pinterest collection than a good old fashioned Usenet flame war.
“You can have long text conversations,” Miller says. “But it will tend to be visual stuff, because it’s mobile. For anything you do in the real world, text and photos are the best way to capture things.”
Rooms intentionally lacks something crucial to visual sharing on Instagram, Facebook and similar services. Every post on those social networks is shaped by the context of who originates it. Social posts often have value not because of content, but because viewers are interested in what’s new with the author. The downside of this is that people commonly varnish their Tweets, Facebook stories and Instagram pictures to make themselves look good. They are advertisments for themselves, status reports in every way. Not so with the posts in Rooms, where expressions must hold interest by virtue of interesting content alone.
“We’re not building a social network,” Miller emphasizes. In its initial release, Rooms doesn’t even allow users to send a direct message to someone else in the group. Users can’t transfer their personas from one room to another. And, as previously noted, one’s behavior on Rooms has no overlap whatsoever with the vast social graph of Facebook itself.
“Guess what information we ask for – zero,” says Miller. “We don’t ask for your first name, your last name, or your Facebook profile. We don’t ask for anything! We see ourselves as a vehicle for going to rooms and making rooms. When you first went to Netscape, did they ask you who you were?”
The app’s conspicuous disconnect between one’s persona in a room and their real-life identity means that Miller and his team might take on negative baggage associated with anonymity: reckless posts, trolling, perhaps even outright lies told by those who know they won’t have to answer for it. After early leaks about the product, some commentators are already labeling it Facebook’s answer to Secret, a controversial app that encourages confessions and rumors.
Miller rebuffs the comparison. He says that the nickname one adopts when creating or joining a room is a form of identity that apps like Secret don’t have. “You get to know the regulars!” he says. On the other hand, Miller embraced the anonymity, extolling the fact that Rooms doesn’t even have user profiles. And he seems to have no problem with the prospect of Rooms partaking in one of the most radioactive aspects of Secret: insiders dishing about their employers. “One of the first examples we used for testing is a room for Facebook employees to talk about Facebook without people knowing who you are,” he says. “It was really awesome; there were honest conversations.”
Miller says that it would be a mistake to jump to any early conclusions about Rooms. In the spirit of some of the great successes of the Internet, he joyfully anticipates that his users might redirect the platform to uses he never considered. “I’m not even sure that Rooms will be best organized by interests,” he says. “We just want to make the best mobile forum software. I’ve learned not to overplan things — just give people flexible tools and see what they do with it.”
Welcome to the asocial graph.
