Someone mentions chat rooms and you immediately flashback to the 90s, they were a pretty big deal online at that time, not so much right now. However Facebook is reportedly testing chat rooms, which will allow users of the world’s biggest social networks to “Host Chats” from their homepage. Facebook itself hasn’t acknowledged the existence of this project, TechCrunch reports citing people familiar with the situation.
Facebook already allows two people to chat simultaneously on the social network, multiple users can talk in a single conversation through Facebook Messages. The new chat rooms function will reportedly promote chats that a user hosts in the News Feed, allowing their friends to join in without needing an invitation. Users are said to have the option to set privacy restrictions. It is said that for now, Facebook’s chat rooms only support text. The function is said to be similar in function to Facebook Groups, though it is possible that chat rooms can be structured to be more appropriate for kids and to increase active discussion threads across the social network. There’s no saying when Facebook chat rooms will be made available to everyone, for all we know, it might never make its way out of the test phase.