Facebook’s new chat room app brings back the 90s

Can Facebook bring back the chat room popularity of the ’90s? The massive social networking company is back in the consumer app inventing game with Rooms, a chatroom mobile application. It harkens back to the ’90s, when anonymous chatrooms on AOL—and before that via Internet Relay Chat—were some of the earliest forms of online socializing. Rooms serve as virtual settings for photos, videos and text posted in the spirit of taking part in a conversation about chosen topics.

The reason people got excited about the Internet was because they realized, ‘Wow, I can find other common people to me.’

Josh Miller, Facebook

This is the reported “anonymous app” that leaked in The New York Times a few weeks ago, sparking curiosity as to whether Facebook would be taking on Whisper and Secret, or the anonymous app going viral on college campuses, Yik Yak. The release of the application came just weeks after Facebook vowed to ease a “real names” policy that prompted drag queen performers to quit the social network and sparked wider protests in the gay community and beyond.

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