Facebook to add public chat rooms to Messenger

Chat rooms are great especially if you find yourself in chat room you don't personally know anyone, it will help you meet new friends and create rapport with someone that could eventually become your future spouse. It has its pro and con though, but it's great generally. Yahoo messenger helped a lot of people find love and business partners in the past. The world is a much bigger place now with a lot of nice people out there looking for who to mingle with, this is a perfect time for facebook to introduce interest-based public chat rooms in their messenger app, and guess what? They are about to do so.

In 2014, Facebook introduced an app called Rooms, which allowed people to pseudonymously start and join interest-based public chats. However, it didn’t garner much traction and was shut down in less than a year after it was launched.

Now, there are reports that code buried in Messenger’s iOS app, shows that Facebook are working in a new ‘Rooms’ feature again.

The description of the hidden feature discovered by a tech evangelist chris messina  reads as follows:

Rooms are for public conversations about topics and interests. Each room has a link that can be shared so anyone on Messenger can join the conversation.

From the code, it looks like you can start a public room, join other rooms, and invite people to join you in a room by sharing a link to it.

• See how to invite people to join your Whatsapp chat group by sharing a link to it

Facebook remained clammed up about the new feature, only saying that it ocassionally runs “small tests”.

While Facebook could stand to increase engagement with a public chat feature, it’s important to remember that the standalone Rooms app failed the first time. It’s likely that there are several reasons behind that, and the company will need to figure them all out if it wants to make the second coming of Rooms a success.

That being said, it now has a much more mature app in place, in the form of Messenger, to enable people to engage in public chats. That, combined with its powerful Bot framework, could help Facebook create a solid experience for people who want to discuss their interests, and allow developers to enhance these rooms with useful functionality.

Even if Facebook decides to launch Rooms publicly, it might be a while before it does so. The company seems to be currently focused on rolling out features for video. In May, it launched a Live Video Graph to help users find interesting segments in broadcasts; most recently, it added Instant Video to Messenger and is now slated to bring Facebook Live to desktops soon.