Facebook's Rooms app

Facebook released a new app this week- dubbed Rooms - that will let you chat anonymously about topics that interest you.

You can access Rooms on your phone (iOS only at this point), and you can create and customize Rooms yourself.

"Early users have already created rooms for everything from beat boxing videos to parkour to photos of home-cooked meals," Facebook Product Manager Josh Miller said in a blog post. "There's even a room called 'Kicks From Above' that showcases photographs of cool shoes in cool places."

"We may share information about you within the companies and services operated by Facebook to understand and improve our services, but the information you share on Rooms will never be posted to your Facebook account and the information you share on Facebook will never be posted to your Rooms account," according to a privacy statement from Rooms.

You can also add photos and videos to a Room, making it a bit more lively than the text-only chat rooms. If you own a Room, add a cover photo, select colors, pin messages of note, customize member permissions, and decide whether your content can be linked on the Web.

Note, however, that information shared on Rooms is public. "This includes your usernames, comments, and photos," according to Rooms. "Anyone online or offline, including people off of Rooms, may be able to see this information. When you join a room, your status as a member of the room may also be visible to other Rooms users, such as the moderator of the Room."

The push for a more anonymous social networking experience comes after Facebook was criticized for requiring San Francisco-area drag queens to use their "real" names on the site. Facebook has long required people to use their real names on the site, but people frequently ignore that rule, and Facebook doesn't really do anything about it unless people complain.

At the moment, the Rooms app is on the App Store, but those who try to download it are getting an error. The Rooms team urged people to keep trying.