Facebook’s Room Service
Drawing on his self-conjured nostalgia for the days of online pioneers, Miller eventually identified three aspects of the earlier Internet and web now in danger of being eclipsed in the age of mobile and apps. The legacy web gatherings were distinct places — when you were on the Well or Metafilter, you felt you were somewhere, the online version of a “third place” after home and work. Also before the mobile movement, things were more customizable — you could tweak the look of your software to your liking Finally, when Internet was just rising, identities were fluid; people could chose a different persona for every activity and website.
.. While Miller talks rhapsodically about the dense prose of early conference rooms like the Well, Rooms seems more geared to the quick-capture, low-attention span of a mobile generation. Most of the examples he showed me were centered around an image or video with just a soupçon of text. In that sense, the rooms one might find in the app are more akin to a group-generated Pinterest collection than a good old fashioned Usenet flame war.
“You can have long text conversations,” Miller says. “But it will tend to be visual stuff, because it’s mobile. For anything you do in the real world, text and photos are the best way to capture things.”