Remember chat rooms? They're back! In Facebook form. It's all thanks to a new iPhone app called Rooms (free), which lets you create and manage your own Facebook wall-style communities. Each room comes fully furnished with custom settings and surprisingly powerful moderation powers, all while being separate from (but vaguely similar to) Facebook. But Rooms, like other Facebook experiments on mobile such as Slingshot, feels underpowered and overly gimmicky.

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Note that while Rooms is made by Facebook, the app does not require a Facebook account. In fact, it stands entirely apart from Facebook. Each user creates a different nickname for each Room they join, and authenticating your account with an email is strictly optional. Rooms ran swimmingly on both my iPhone 5c and aged 4s.

Posters in Your Room
Discussion in Rooms occur in, well, Rooms. They're basically chat rooms, with posts arranged in reverse chronological order (i.e., the newest on top). Each Room has a number of unique settings, which I address below, but they all look like simplified versions of a Facebook wall.

Within a Room, users can view, comment, and like other posts. They can also create their own posts, consisting of images, videos, or text. I like that you can shoot new photos and videos directly from within Rooms, in addition to simply uploading content you've already shot from your camera roll. Note that all videos loop endlessly, Vine-style.

Videos are limited to a generous 90 seconds, far beyond that seen in Vine or Instagram. Weirdly, when I tried to post a full 90-second video to Rooms, it kicked up an error message. Perhaps they mean 89.99999 seconds. Shorter videos worked just fine in my testing, however.

What's missing in Rooms are a lot of the elements that are key for communities. There are no events, and there's no way to direct message other users, which isn't surprising since each user creates a different nickname for each Room. This gives users lots of anonymity on Rooms, though not as much as the privacy-minded Cryptocat. The practical upshot is that Rooms doesn't feel clean and refined, but uncomfortably claustrophobic.

Room Codes
To join a Room, you'll need that much-maligned (probably unfairly) tech artifact: the QR code. There is no searching or requesting an invitation in Rooms (though Rooms can be shared via URL and viewed, but not interacted with, from a Web browser). Instead, you have to be invited directly. This sense of exclusivity is one of the strongest things Rooms has going for it, but it's also one of its weaknesses, as I will explain.

Any member of a Room can generate a QR code for that Room. Non-members can simply scan the screen of a member to get access to that Room. You can also screenshot a QR code from within Rooms—an odd process, and one that Rooms uses extensively to promote discovery within the app. You can also share and scan QR codes sent to you directly and stored in your camera roll, or on a computer screen, or even printed off and hung on a wall. I should mention that I found scanning a QR code in Rooms took significantly longer than any other use of QR codes I have encountered.

This use of QR codes is certainly unique, but unfortunately, it also makes it nearly impossible to simply discover a Room, though new users are automatically enrolled in a Room operated by Rooms to help you find new Rooms. But there's no way to search for topics that interest you, leaving it to chance that you'll find a Room you like. That said, the limited access will almost certainly keep rooms small enough for hobbyist moderators to manage, and maybe that's the point.