Facebook's strategy to create separate apps is a good one, but Rooms seem rather niche. Facebook groups are better for many purposes since they have access to notifications and the newsfeed. Reddit probably works better for large groups and allows anonymity too (though not on a per Reddit basis). So Rooms work for groups where anonymity is valuable (ie. sharing secrets, controversial opinions, ect) and where the groups aren't too large. Here, the discovery mechanism being overly complex actually does provide an advantage. It makes it more likely to be "underground" and hence cool.
I disagree - Rooms seems like it is trying to do too many things at once.
The discovery mechanism is QR codes, which wasn't "underground" enough to boost any marketing or advertising activities that were based on them. In fact, because each room's value relies on user-generated content, I have a feeling that this will be short lived, if only because it is so difficult to get more users into a room to generate content.
One of the reasons subreddits achieved such popularity was because of the extreme ease by which users can find, join, and start submitting.
Without clear connections between rooms, all it's going to take is joining a few empty rooms before users become disengaged and start ignoring invites like they do most other QR codes.
The UX is so silly. Give me a list of damn rooms I can join, or a search feature. I'm all for the screenshot invite method as an additional feature, but it's a terrible onboarding process and I think will make many people not bother.
This would be amazing if there were indexed public rooms, or even rooms tied to geo-locations that you could join because they were based solely in your area. The coded invite-only kills it.
Quite unexpected on the part of Facebook, and looks like an interesting project.
A couple of points on their Privacy page bothers me, though:
> Once you confirm your account, you may delete content you have posted at any time. <…>
> To sign up for Rooms, you may provide us with information such as an email address and usernames. <…>
> We may share information about you within the companies and services operated by Facebook to understand and improve our services [but the information from Rooms won't be posted to Facebook and vice-versa].
It'd be more fun if you couldn't delete your content (so that messages posted a while ago don't lose their context), but instead you could be absolutely anonymous (not even having to provide valid email address, which per above will quite likely be matched with your Facebook account at some point).
>> "It'd be more fun if you couldn't delete your content (so that messages posted a while ago don't lose their context), but instead you could be absolutely anonymous (not even having to provide valid email address, which per above will quite likely be matched with your Facebook account at some point)."
If they did that people would be complaining that Facebook won't let them delete their data.
More likely a XMPP MUC [0], given that part of Facebook's architecture involves XMPP (as far as I remember you can login on your XMPP client with your Facebook credentials and discuss with your Facebook contacts but not with other contacts)
If this is true and they later open up federation, it will be awesome.
Because it's the 11% that matters. I mean this honestly, I'm not being dismissive. I could point you at plenty of data to back this up, but the simple fact that almost everyone's app goes iOS first should be sufficient to indicate that it's the platform that matters most.
Side note: I've got both iOS and Android devices, and nearly every app on Android feels like a cheap knockoff of the iOS equivalent. I can't think of a single situation where I prefer the Android app over the iOS app.
Because those numbers grossly misrepresent reality. In north american usage stats its often more like 80-20 iOS. Android devices are out there, but they're largely still just being used as phones. iOS users are much more likely to actually use their phones for things like hanging out on random facebook social experiments.
I was speaking to a friend recently about writing iOS & Android apps and their Android apps literally take 4x longer than their iOS apps to build because of hardware fragmentation. As in, bugs in the hardware of phones like the SGS3 (still a very large portion of the market) causing them to have to implement massive workarounds and complete full testing on actual hardware devices.
I love how this comment appears every time there's an app announcement here. Face it, if you want the earliest access to new mobile apps, Android is the wrong platform.
It is around 40%-50% of the developed world. Japan is the #1 iPhone nation at around 55% share, the US alone I remember reading its around 52% of smartphones are iPhones. Also 50% of iPhones out there use the latest OS (a month from release) and that will only accelerate while only 25% of Androids use the latest OS.
Edit: Also Apple is betting on turning China into an iPhone nation. There were around 20 million pre-orders for the iPhone 6 in China. The iPhone marketshare might shrink as more people get smartphones, but the iPhone isn't going anywhere soon, it seems its going to be the phone of the middle class around the world.
This is the worst hyperlink system I have seen, ever.
I both cannot click to get to it, and it is designed to look like a QR code, yet I cannot take a snapshot of my own phone's screen apart from a clunky use of a mirror (which probably doesn't even work).
The fact that there is no Web frontend is obviously an abysmal choice.
Beyond that, the idea behind this app is amazingly great.
If you screenshot the pic or save it to your camera roll, Rooms will automatically add you to the room. It's effectively the same as taking a picture of the QR code.
Downloaded this app out of curiosity, but deleted it 10 minutes later after failing to find an entrance but stuck at some weird barcode pages...Anyone with me?
Cool :) Haven't really run into many on HN familiar with this. We popped up on TC a couple times and managed to get a few thousand users. The cold start problem is tough one to crack though and things ultimately didn't pan out. It's going to be interesting to see how Facebook, Inc. leverages Facebook for Rooms since they have the same problem there.
I also thought of Bunch. We were/are doing something related (but not really) at ReplyAll.me so I had kept track of your company. Were you a dev there?
If you maintain a social graph database with a billion+ nodes, a feature like this will be a great tool for determining the more relevant relationships among users.
The coloration thing is cute, but it really breaks the invite system. I couldn't for the life of me get it to scan the San Francisco invite. Until I popped it open in Acorn and changed the green to black. That worked really well.
Yeah? Not even with Facebook's massive userbase? Features alone never guarantee success. If only .1% of Facebook's users used it, that would be a million users.
By the same token, when something is pushed to all those users and makes relatively little impact, that's a huge opportunity cost for FB. Each time they try something new, it will alienate some users, whether they just visit FB less or stop using altogether or whatever. They would prefer that new products/services make up for that one-time user cost with compensating increased "stickiness" for other users over time, or some similar benefit. They can't annoy their userbase without limit. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part...
The difference between "going somewhere" for a new product and "going somewhere" for a product with an already large userbase is not the same. When you have the numbers Facebook has getting 0.1% of those users is not "going somewhere".
Rooms is analogus to Slingshot: both apps are cheap clones of popular apps (Whisper/YikYak and Snapchat respectively) with an extra dose of quirky-and-random to appeal to the younger demographic.
I expect Rooms to see the same success as Slingshot. That is, none at all.
