Posted on 10/24/2014 7:13:34 AM PDT by Lorianne
A few weeks ago, we all heard that Facebook — the site where your real name and offline social connections are meant to rule supreme — was planning to launch an app that supported anonymous use. Today, Facebook announced their new product for real… and it sounds an awful lot like a phone-focused version of the chat rooms and message boards AOL brought into our living rooms 20 years ago.
The new app is called Rooms, and in a sense, it does exactly what it sounds like, GigaOm reports: users can create chatrooms on a theme and then invite others to participate.
Of course, it’s now 2014, not 1993, and times have changed. Plenty of other discussion forums have sprung up in that time, and Rooms, says GigaOm, takes cues from them, too. Room founders can determine their room’s look, feel, and rules and then invite others to join. And the streams of conversation can include images, sounds, and videos, because nobody wants to live in a world where you can’t answer a question with exactly the right *.gif.
Room links are shared by QR code, because long URLs are a pain in the butt on mobile devices. If someone shares the QR code more widely — say on Twitter or even on Facebook — then a room can attract a wide audience and become a major chattering hub. If the codes are kept private, then your book club can theoretically use the room without any random strangers jumping in.
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
more ways to waste time for the young.
go outside and play or skateboard, anything !!! just get outside.
Reminds me of the old days of Mirc chat and Usenet newsgroups. Good times...good times.
One thing the older formats lacked was clutter.
continued exploitation of narcissism. These friggin kids grow up lacking real world experience and interaction....forever stuck in a quasi adolescent mind set...like you said - get some fresh air, ride a 4 wheeler - go fishing - talk to a face
I used to love those old AOL rooms...they were kicking back when I first got online in 1998. I met some good online friends there...I’m still in an email loop with two of them, one of whom is a longtime Freeper.
The politics and religion rooms were fun....chairs were always flying in those.
I always liked being in the NFL chatroom on gamedays, sitting in front of the TV with a laptop in my lap.
Reminds me of the “chat room wars” on Yahoo chat just after 9/11.
Sounds to me like just another IRC network. There are already many of those, and thousands of chatrooms. Web-based IRC clients have been around a long time, too.
Make it easier for criminals, pedophiles, and ISIS recruiters to use. Sounds swell!
LOL! I was in a football chat room talking smack to the Vikings fans. That was the day Gary Andersen missed a field goal to send the Vikings into the Super Bowl. That was the year Denver won their 2nd straight SB.
Reminds me of a caller on Rush Limbaugh about 20 years ago. This woman was discussing some political issue and Rush asked where do you get this information? She said “The AOL chatrooms last night! Weren’t you on there?” Rush said no I wasn’t on AOL!
BTTT served that purpose in a way
Some of the newest clutter and scripting laden sites are really trials of patience.
LOL!
Agreed. Like those “Top Ten” articles that you have to wait for everything to load, including all the video advertisements, and then realize you’re only seeing #10 of the top ten, and you have to click to the next page, and wait for everything to load again, just to see #9.
Yes, I really liked them too. Townhall used to have a really nice one back in the day.
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