 "Facebook testing a chat room-like feature")
Chat rooms were quite popular till about a decade ago and now Facebook is looking to revive the trend with the testing of a new feature codenamed “Host Chat” that will allow users to chat with those who aren’t on their friends list but are friends of friends. A source familiar with the development told TechCrunch that a ‘mid-sized’ team at Facebook is working on it.
New “Host Chat” feature being tested!
Facebook has confirmed to sites like TechCrunch and CNET that it is testing this feature “in the wild”and declined to reveal anything more.
“Host Chat” would allow users to do just that - host chats from the homepage’s status update composer. It would be the third option there after Update Status and Add Photos/Video.
When a user hosts a chat, any of his/her friends on Facebook can join the conversation even without an invitation. The host, though, would have the option to enable privacy settings to allow only a specific group of people to view the notification in their feeds and then decide whether or not to join the chat.
Early internal tests on the feature supported only text. Now while it is likely that Emoji would be included into “Host Chat”, there is no word on whether Facebook’s popular messenger stickers would figure too. Initial tests on this feature were also only for the web, but considering how big Facebook is on mobile, “Host Chat” may just be included there, if it does well.
A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch that they keep testing things regularly with a small number of users and these at times are limited to only certain countries.
The social networking giant faces stiff competition in the messaging arena from several players and its efforts are only an indication that it wants to do something radically different from its rivals, and of course get people to spend more time on its platform.
Facebook already allows users to interact with their friends and family via its messenger feature, through pictures and posts, but chat rooms are sure to be a completely different ballgame.